Bugzilla – Bug 461262
nvidia driver locks X server after logout, Thinkpad T61 / Quadro NVS 140
Last modified: 2009-03-01 16:58:06 UTC
A fresh, KDE4/3/Gnome installation of openSUSE 11.1 on a Lenovo Thinkpad T61 with nvidia Quadro NVS 140 graphics. The installation (wrongly?) detects the "MESA" (not nv) driver initially. Installing the nvidia proprietary driver (versions from 176 to 180.16 tried) results in the following behaviour: Scenario 1 ~~~~~~~~~~ 1. System starts up fine and presents (KDM4) logon screen. 2. Can log on to the system fine, everything works as expected, NVIDIA logo and then desktop appears. 3. Choose "Logout" from KDE4; KDE4 logs off and laptop screen is blank but for a nonflashing underscore in the top-left. 4. System still appears to be running but nothing can be changed on the screen; CTRL+ALT+Fx do nothing. The only key that works is CTRL+ALT+DEL which starts a graceful restart, suddenly the SUSE shutdown graphic appears and the system restarts normally. Hitting ESC reveals pixel garbage on the fb console. Scenario 2 ~~~~~~~~~~ 1. System starts up fine and presents (KDM4) logon screen. Everything is normal. 2. Press CTRL+ALT+F1 to bring up a console, log in as root 3. "init 3" shuts down X/KDM 4. "init 5" to start X/KDM again 5. Same as (3) in scenario 1. blank screen/still cursor and no response from any keyboard shortcuts except CTRL+ALT+DEL. Tried ~~~~~ 1. Changing window manager to GDM. Improves the situation slightly in the sense that after a period of hanging (several minutes) with the blank screen and _ cursor, as above, GDM/X will start and normal service resumes. 2. Changing the fb console to 80x25 text (vga=normal kernel boot option) again improves things slightly. After a short while CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE appears to restore responsiveness and kernel messages report "Cannot start X server" and "X-*-Theme" current theme is in use (.../kdmrc file). 3. Just about every version of the nvidia driver from 176.x to 180.16 beta) The newer betas (180+) show garbage graphics briefly during logon->desktop transition, but improve the compositing performance in KDE4 considerably. 4. the nv driver does not have this issue. Ie. I can log in and log out, init 3 and init 5, just fine, and everything works as expected. I cannot get nv to run in higher than 16bpp on the T61, so smooth backdrops look pixelated. 5. OpenSUSE 11.0 fresh install on the same machine, with the proprietary nvidia driver 176, works fine - no problems. I can't determine whether this issue is related to KDE/KDM or the nvidia driver, or a combo of both. My feeling is it is mainly with the nvidia driver, but similar driver versions at the lower end work fine in opensuse 11.0. At the moment this is a showstopper. I cannot get any graphics driver to work properly on the Lenovo T61 with nvidia graphics. I don't care too much about compositing/fancy desktop effects, but I do want 24bpp colour and stability.
Unfortunately we don't track any NVIDIA driver bugs filed against openSUSE in Novell's bugzilla. Please complain directly to NVIDIA. Thanks.
And the fact that this problem occurs only in openSUSE 11.1 and not in 11.0 makes this a specific NVIDIA issue? The same drivers work fine in 11.0, so this would seem to me to be related specifically to 11.1 and not purely a driver issue. I leave it to you to decide how to take this further. For now I will roll back to 11.0, and if I find further useful info I will post here.
I have the same problem. when i try to logout or "Ctrl+Alt+Backspace", it turns to Black Screen in Intrepid. Absolutely, there is no problem using the save drivers in 11.0 and here: http://forums.opensuse.org/hardware/386819-logging-out-black-screen.html the ATI card happened the same thing. I think there's something wrong with the Xorg.
As a workaround, change ServerTimeout to 45 in /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc. Logging out will take some time, but eventually the login screen comes back. Thanks to Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper: http://movingparts.net/2008/12/22/opensuse-111-and-nvidia/ BTW, this timeout value has changed from 11.0 (60) to 11.1 (15).
(In reply to comment #4) > As a workaround, change ServerTimeout to 45 in > /usr/share/kde4/config/kdm/kdmrc. Logging out will take some time, but > eventually the login screen comes back. Thanks to Jason 'vanRijn' Kasper: > http://movingparts.net/2008/12/22/opensuse-111-and-nvidia/ > > BTW, this timeout value has changed from 11.0 (60) to 11.1 (15). And was changed back to 60. At least for SLE11/Factory. Not sure if there has been an update for 11.1 or is still in the queue though.