Bug 286711 – Nouveau DRM (builtin) crashes Xorg, blank screen and a centered mouse pointer as result

• Status: RESOLVED INVALID
• Product: Gentoo Linux

[Description Daniel Kuehn (RETIRED) 2009-09-27 22:18:31 UTC]

I have taken a vanilla 2.6.31 kernel and patch with grsec and then did symlinks to nouveau drm and built them into kernel.

Being in a hardened gentoo environment doesnt seem to fit nouveau-drm because it crashes Xorg-server whenever you try to start it with the error recoreded in the kern.log (see attachment).
All you end up is a blank screen with a mouse pointer either in the middle or somewhere else ( have gotten a few variations).

With some help from the people over at #grsecurity we manage to get that libdrm is causing problems as seen in the strace (see attachment).

If I switch to a completly vanilla kernel everything works just like it should.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1.Compile a kernel with grsecurity patch (both hardened-sources and my own creation failed in the same way)
2.Use nouveau-drm (either built in or module shouldnt matter)
3.Startx

Actual Results:  
A blank screen and a mouse pointer somewhere on the screen. Everything was unresponsive so I couldnt zap X either.Only way to get out of it was a hard shutdown.

Expected Results:  
The X server should have started and loaded the commands in my xinitrc.

I have a Dell XPS M1330 with a nVidia 8400M GS, 4 GB RAM and a Core 2 Duo T5750.

[Comment 1 Daniel Kuehn (RETIRED) 2009-09-27 22:19:16 UTC]

Created attachment 205416 [details]
Kern.log for the whole duration from bootup to crash

[Comment 2 Daniel Kuehn (RETIRED) 2009-09-27 22:20:07 UTC]

Created attachment 205417 [details]
strace -fttt Xorg log

[Comment 3 Daniel Kuehn (RETIRED) 2009-09-27 22:20:53 UTC]

Created attachment 205419 [details]
The config of the running kernel

[Comment 4 Daniel Kuehn (RETIRED) 2009-09-27 22:21:43 UTC]

Created attachment 205421 [details]
The xorg log created when Xorg crashes

[Comment 5 Daniel Kuehn (RETIRED) 2009-09-27 22:28:44 UTC]

Created attachment 205424 [details]
emerge --info on my system

[Comment 6 Jory A. Pratt 2009-12-31 01:31:58 UTC]

Until proper support is added to kernel your on your own. We are not in the business of supporting features that are not apart of the kernel tree/gentoo tree. If you would like to see this fixed, I suggest posting upstream.

[Comment 7 Anthony Basile 2010-09-05 15:12:57 UTC]

There is now support for nouveau in the hardened-sources-2.6.34-rX kernels.  It works for me.

[Comment 8 Daniel Kuehn (RETIRED) 2010-09-05 16:39:27 UTC]

Me, spender, pipacs and xake managed to solve this one maybe a week or two after I reported it.

The fix was to just increase the inital buffer for the graphic card iirc, but pipacs and spender incorporated it in the next Grsec/PaX patch.

This bug should be closed as resolved :P