Plasma with nVidia issue...

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Fri Jul 22, 2016 3:09 pm Post subject: Plasma with nVidia issue...

I have a new issue with Plasma and an nVidia card. SDDM works, but upon login the blue bar moves about 1/4 of the way to the right, the screen goes black, and the cursor works. The user is in the video group, as is the SDDM user. The system worked flawlessly in KDE4. I can use CTRL+ALT+F1 to get to a root shell and kill the user processes, but none of the users on the system can login. I don't see errors in the X.org logs either. Help?
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

'New issue with Plasma-5' means it has been working before with Plasma-5 or you just have upgraded to it?

Please provide information for help. emerge --info

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sun Jul 24, 2016 5:00 pm Post subject:

I am not with the laptop in question, but I did not mean to indicate that the issue existed before. I upgraded from 4 to 5 due to massive issues attempting to stay with 4 and everything worked (even SDDM) except this. This has not happened on any other system, so I am stuck. I will provide emerge information when I get to the laptop. From my memory, we're using the nVidia driver from portage (not Nouveau) with the latest 3.18 kernel (nVidia doesn't support the driver in 4.x yet, maybe ever). Everything else appears to be fine, just this.
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The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Thu Aug 04, 2016 3:12 pm Post subject:

Been busy working on other projects, but I have some time so I'd like to solve this.

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 7:25 pm Post subject:

Anybody? Is this just a "KDE no longer supports you" situation since 4 is gone and 5 isn't working?
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

Sounds like it is a really old card, please check

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 7:42 pm Post subject:

I would, except that I can't, since I cannot login and trying it from the shell results in it being unable to open a display. It is an NVS110M, G72M chipset.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

you can't start a fallback session?

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 8:09 pm Post subject:

Not sure, how would I do that? I have never had to before.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

You can choose a different session in SDDM.

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sat Aug 06, 2016 8:50 pm Post subject:

OH that, I can try that.

*UPDATE*

I have Plasma and XSession. XSession simply produces a black screen then back to SDDM.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

It may not be a Plasma-5 issue then...

EDIT: Please try with lightdm or configure your ~/.xinitrc to start Plasma-5 with startx so we can rule out SDDM.

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2016 2:47 am Post subject:

Alright, but I'll go ahead and tell you that I have NEVER had lightdm work for me and don't want to get into troubleshooting it. I wish the team had simply kept KDM. I wish they'd finished 4 before starting 5 too. I'll report back shortly, or tomorrow if I get too tired.
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platojones · Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2016 3:01 am Post subject:

Do you happen to be running 'keychain' on your system? If so, you may want to have a look a this:

https://github.com/sddm/sddm/issues/118

I had a very similar issue when I converted to plasma. The last comment in to that issue solved it for me (well, more of a workaround than a solution).

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2016 11:38 am Post subject:

asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

@Fitzcarraldo: Out of curiosity, what gives

Josef.95 · Advocate Joined: 03 Sep 2007 Posts: 4553 Location: Germany

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2016 2:47 pm Post subject:

Alright, I have some answers. I am not running keychain, nor have I ever used or heard of it before now, so I believe that it is not the issue. I do know they claimed it was unmaintainable, but that sounds like an excuse to me, since they have the sources and all, but KDE is not my project.

As for LightDM, I followed that post. I have tried it on multiple systems, not all of them having nVidia cards, and cannot get it working. I did however get SDDM working on every single system I have Gentoo on, except for this one. I am not sure why it is being so hardcore here, if the issue is SDDM. I mean it SEEMS like SDDM works. I can type my name and password and press enter. They are accepted. It is during the part where the large, horizontal bar which has the blue line that goes from left to right appears that the trouble begins. The status bar moves about 1/3 of the way to the right, then the entire screen fades to black with a cursor. Is that loading screen part of Plasma or SDDM? I am fairly sure that is Plasma.

I have the nVidia drivers masked to 304.131, but did not know I could go to kernel 4.x with them. When i set this laptop up I was told to stay with 3.18 or the drivers would not work. I will change my kernel mask to ">sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.1" and see if we can use it. Thanks!
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Fitzcarraldo · Posted: Sun Aug 07, 2016 8:21 pm Post subject:

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Mon Aug 08, 2016 4:00 pm Post subject:

Nothing seems to change when I modify the xinitrc file. Perhaps I am doing it wrong, or perhaps it isn't SDDM.
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Josef.95 · Advocate Joined: 03 Sep 2007 Posts: 4553 Location: Germany

Hm, have you installed the kde-plasma/plasma-meta package, with all dependencies?
Try

Navar · Guru Joined: 20 Aug 2012 Posts: 353

My experience relates to plasma profile in the tree on ~x86. Mostly a clean install via depclean and forced removals of prior KDE4->5 that worked for a time until I got behind on updates for months.

nouveau is entirely broken (at boot with modeset) for a 6000 series in an older PC and a 7900 GS in this laptop. So that adds an extra special level of pain with the wayland enforcement.

So this is my guess on what is affecting you.

Main thing to remember: nvidia 304 series doesn't support egl, gbm, gallium, gles1/2, or wayland (and therefore llvm). But they can still be made to work.

You may be fighting with kde-plasma/kwin, x11-libs/cairo, and kde-frameworks/kwayland that try to force those options with mesa, which we really shouldn't need.

Right now it's a mess. SDDM did work for me, for a time, then didn't (haven't retried), so I removed for lightDM which also works. It might have been prior config files needing cleaned out. Anyway, with nvidia 304, both only work with 1 session option for plasma, when 2 would be shown. In SDDM one will show clearly with wayland as the option (avoid, black screen), and one without (which I could make work with X). LightDM will show just 'plasma' for both, one will be the that works, the other will be trying to do wayland. You may need to do a reboot rather than just restarting xdm to get success with the other option.

kde-frameworks/kwayland, kde-plasma/kscreenlocker and kde-plasma/kwin all require wayland to install.

And the code paths seem to cause some issues here and there due to that (such as the screen lock). Kwin will decide the card needed reset due to effects being frozen and then it'll eventually resume from lockup fine. I've tried the option to disable incompatible effects, but who knows if it's having an effect. Seems not very long ago I was testing KDE4 with similar quirks.

The whole point in doing this for me was also as an alternative work around to the cairo gradients patch fiasco that affected performance very badly in GTK environments (post Gnome2->Mate) (2012-13) on cards requiring the 304 series drivers. Sure enough, with mesa mostly stripped and nvidia 304 being allowed to do most of its job, QT scrolling, etc. performance is decent without spiking the CPU for rendering.

I haven't looked into this too much further, but here and there are some threads trying to find a way to avoid wayland entirely.

I'm also not using SystemD, which may cause some additional KDE5 growing pains since they seem to have finally went whole hog in that direction.

The_Great_Sephiroth · Posted: Wed Aug 10, 2016 4:46 pm Post subject:

So the incomplete Wayland stuff, which is supposed to replace X, is most likely the issue? I did note that Wayland was required, but it worked for a while, and now it doesn't. I wans't using the Wayland option though. I was planning on waiting for it to be, you know, complete. It seems there's quite a bit of incomplete/beta software being pushed right now. My opinion is that Plasma is nowhere near ready and now it builds on a project which is also incomplete. This is getting to be a headache.

I don't mind using Wayland, when it is complete and functions as a replacement for X, not before. If something requires it but I don't choose to use it as I am doing now, that is also fine. If KDE goes systemd though, I'm out. I'll switch to BSD or something.
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asturm · Developer Joined: 05 Apr 2007 Posts: 8936

You are _not_ using wayland.