[nvidia-glx-new] CharacterConsole+Compiz/Beryl crash

Thank you for your bug report.

CarloBaldassi:
Can you see whether disabling sync to vblank as described in https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20/+bug/96240/comments/28 makes any difference?

Setting to needsinfo pending reply from CarloBaldassi.

It makes a lot of difference!

Complete description:
I un-ticked the "Sync to VBlank" option in Beryl Settings Manager. This made it work... once. The second time, the black screen appeared again and hard reboot was still necessary.
Then, I updated metacity and tried several times again. Now it still works perfectly only once, but then on successive trials the system is up again, just with metacity running instead of Beryl, so that I just need to manually restart Beryl and everything's ok again. I hope this can give a clue about what's going on.

Thanks for the hard work!

This sounds similar to bug #96240 ...

Perhaps closer to Bug #105673 ...

CarloBaldassi:
What is the output of
dpkg -l nvidia-glx\* | grep ii
?

here it is:

ii nvidia-glx-new 1.0.9755+2.6.20.5-15.20 NVIDIA binary XFree86 4.x/X.Org 'new' driver

Problem solved!
It amounted at adding these two lines to /etc/modprobe.d/options

options nvidia NVreg_SoftEDIDs=0
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222"

this also solves screen flickering and other strange hangs which occur with the generic kernel.
I found this in [https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-source-2.6.17/+bug/53060 #53060]

Carlo:
Do you actually need both of the parameters? Does using
options nvidia NVreg_RegistryDwords="PerfLevelSrc=0x2222"
alone resolve the problem?

The only information I could really find about the PerlLevelSrc parameter was in this thread: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=80888 . It seems that it is set in the Windows driver .inf files provided by some laptop manufacturers. So far it is only reported to help laptop machines (and it does not necessarily make a difference in every case). Further, it is unclear what side effects this parameter might have (e.g. can it damage hardware?) and what purpose it serves aside from "GPU tuning"...

Setting to needsinfo pending reply from CarloBaldassi.

(Punting from Ubuntu -> linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20)

Carlo:
Can you also include the output of
lspci -nn | grep -i nv
?

First question: the second line is probably the needed one, the other being metioned in the beryl "troubleshooting nVidia" section as a workaround for suspend2disk to work properly (I have a HP nw9440 laptop), but I can't reboot and perform the test at the moment, sorry.

Second: here is the output to the required command:

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: nVidia Corporation G71 [Quadro FX 1500M] [10de:029b] (rev a1)

BTW, before modifying /etc/modprobe.d/options I upgraded to the latest nvidia drivers 100.14.09, and the problem was still there

Carlo:
OK I'll leave this in needsinfo until you can get around to testing it.

[Expired for linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]