[OpenIndiana-discuss] Nvidia driver causes immediate kernel panic with NVS 510

[James Madgwick]

Hi,

I have a problem with Nvidia. I don't think there's much that can be
done about it, but I thought it would be worth mentioning in case
anyone else has experienced this before and in case anyone is looking
for a workaround in future.

I did a fresh installation of 2021.10 on an Z77 system which has an
Nvidia Quadro NVS 510 GPU. I initially tried the GUI version but fell
back to the text version because the GUI rebooted straight after the
language selection (this was the panic).

After installation, I realised the problem was with the Nvidia driver.
A few seconds after X is launched, there's a kernel panic. It gets as
far as a showing a white square in the top left of the screen.
Xorg.0.log is empty. The version of the Nvidia driver installed by
default apparently support this GPU (Kepler).

I worked around the issue by creating an xorg.conf which specifies the
'vesa' driver and not 'nvidia' (as used by default). This works and
MATE starts and works as expected (although with 800x600) - the problem
seems to be with the nvidia module.

I imagine the way forward would be to report the problem to Nvidia
seeing as the driver is closed source. I doubt they would be interested
though due to the age of this GPU (Kepler consumer GeForce is now
unsupported).

James Madgwick