Bug#696360: nvidia-glx: Sporadic X freezes in gnome shell

[Mar Mel]

This issue is specific to gnome-shell. In the four months since I reported this, I've been running in XFCE without a single problem.

Every so often when I build a newer kernel I'll pop back into a gnome session and reproduce this freeze within a short time.

I've essentially ruled out the hardware as the culprit. Under XFCE I can run the full suite of piglet openGL tests. Additionally, in Windows 7 I can overclock the GPU and hit it with hours of FurMark stress testing, again without a hiccup. If it can handle such an extreme load, I don't think rendering a few Gnome windows should be too much to ask.

After I hit upon this bug back in December I ended up ditching the binary blob and sticking with nouveau. The same (albiet different syslog messages) freezing problem happens with that driver as well. I spent a lot of time trying to track this down with the help of the upstream nouveau folks on IRC and tried out some patches against their git head rev. Still couldn't get to the root cause, so ended up just sticking with XFCE.

I do hope this gets some more attention as Wheezy proliferates after release. It may not even be nVidia-specific, as there's a thread on the Debian forums regarding this same problem using ATI graphics as well. If ever we could come up with a reliable STR, this may need to be changed to affecting the gnome-shell package, not the graphics driver.