Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 376051
Nouveau driver doesn't start at boot time
Last modified: 2008-01-22 14:47:41 EST
Description of problem: ----------------------- The nouveau driver doesn's start in boot time (after kernel boot, and while services are being loaded), so the boot process is shown completely in text mode. Anyway, after the boot is completed, the graphical login screen (which uses the nouveau driver) starts normally, and after login, the Desktop is started normally. So it's probably some problem at boot time. If I change the drive to "nv" (xorg.conf) and reboot, then everything works normally (graphical boot included). Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): ------------------------------------------------------------- xorg-x11-drv-nouveau-2.1.5-2.fc8 How reproducible: ----------------- Always Steps to Reproduce: ------------------- 1. Change the "Driver" to "nouveau" in /etc/X11/xorg.conf. 2. Reboot the computer Actual results: Boot process is shown in text mode. Expected results: Boot process should be shown in graphical mode. Additional info: # lspci | grep VGA 00:05.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C51G [GeForce 6100] (rev a2)
I've added a comment to the invisible cursor bug report ( Bug 182517 #58 ). The cursor is invisible both with "nv" and "nouveau" drivers. As a workaround, you can add: Option "HWCursor" "off" to xorg.conf. But the bug should be fixed, since the cursor should be rendered by hardware.
Sorry, I don't get whether after adding that to /etc/X11/xorg.conf the computer was booted in the graphical mode.
I've just tried again, and got same results: - "nouveau" driver: boot (loading of services) in text mode. - "nv" driver: boot in graphical mode. As aditional information, with the nouveau driver, I can see that it tries to launch the graphical mode (screen goes into black for 1-2 seconds), but then it returns to text mode, and continues loading services in text mode. When all services have been loaded, the graphical mode does start to show the login screen (gdm) and then everything is normal. Desktop with nouveau driver seems to be as stable as with nv driver. I hope direct rendering to be added soon to nouveau in order to support compiz, avoiding the need of installing privative drivers.
I think this is actually an rhgb bug. We used to start rhgb's X server with DRI disabled because it would steal DRI away from the gdm X server. However, rhgb now waits until the X server is completely exited before itself exiting, so we should be able to hand off to gdm just fine. rhgb-0.17.7-4.fc9 will enable DRI, so this shouldn't happen anymore. Please reopen if it does.