Kernel 4.7.0 and nouveau driver breaks most consolefonts

pking · n00b Joined: 11 Sep 2009 Posts: 61

After upgrading to 4.7.0, I found that most console fonts did not display correctly -- I usually use sun12x22, for instance, and on the framebuffer this no longer displays the underscore for the cursor, and leaves dashed-line artifacts all over the screen. Similarly, larger sizes of terminus or termsyn were not drawn correctly. I finally found that ter-16n is acceptable, but I'd like to know what happened and how to get sun12x22 back again.

For what it's worth this is on a ThinkPad W510 with 1920x1200 native resolution. I haven't seen anyone else report this issue, so it may be something local to my hardware.

Any ideas? Thanks.

chithanh · Posted: Sun Jul 31, 2016 7:25 am Post subject:

You could bisect between kernel 4.6 and 4.7 to find the offending commit, if that commit is related to nouveau then report this at https://bugs.freedesktop.org/

Is only the internal (LVDS?) display affected, or also external monitors?

irafiral · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2005 Posts: 29 Location: Germany

It is not something with your local hardware.
I use nouveau and font sun12x22 for console on a desktop with two different displays.
I have the described issue on both displays when booting with kernel 4.6.5, but I have it not when booting with kernel 4.6.4.
So I guess kernels >= 4.6.5 affected and something is wrong or new in nouveau kernel code.

pking · n00b Joined: 11 Sep 2009 Posts: 61

My experience is similar; kernel 4.6.4 and earlier were fine, I didn't run 4.6.5, and 4.7.0 shows the problem. Sounds like a bug getting introduced in 4.6.5 somewhere. I can't tell about external displays because I don't have one available to me right now; if anyone else is running nouveau, please try sun12x22 on an external display and see what it looks like. I am not competent to run down a bug/feature in the graphics module of nouveau, unfortunately. But I'm surprised the issue hasn't been noted more widely -- after all, nouveau is fairly common.

Drat.

chithanh · Posted: Mon Aug 01, 2016 6:52 am Post subject:

nouveau is common, but I guess that people using non-default consolefonts are no longer that common.

According to https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/log/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau?h=linux-4.6.y there were nine nouveau patches between 4.6.4 and 4.6.5
So even if you don't want to git bisect, you could try to apply them in reverse to your kernel and see which one caused the problem. In particular, this one https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/commit/?h=linux-4.6.y&id=d91d25ce65ff5f6b98f07a8db89e7f83f4eb64cf looks like a candidate.

And again, reporting this upstream (if no report already exists) is important or else this problem won't get fixed.

pvgoran · n00b Joined: 12 Aug 2016 Posts: 2

I also have this problem, with kernel 4.7.0-pf1 (from https://pf.natalenko.name/).

chithanh · Posted: Fri Aug 12, 2016 11:39 am Post subject:

Report it to freedesktop bugzilla or the nouveau mailing list
https://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/Bugs/

irafiral · n00b Joined: 31 Jan 2005 Posts: 29 Location: Germany

linux-4.7.2

[url]https://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/stable/linux-stable.git/commit/?id=6687b5661ac14fe2ed995e1cdb28529eb3617de8[/url]

pvgoran · n00b Joined: 12 Aug 2016 Posts: 2

So they fixed it. Good news.

as.gentoo · Guru Joined: 07 Aug 2004 Posts: 319

On the first sight I seem to have the same problem although missing visibility of the unserscore '_' does not happen in the terminal (ALT+STRG+F1 to ALT-+STRG+F6).