Bug#686277: (stretch) Legacy 340xx driver for 8400 GS Nvidia non funtional

[Wolfgang Schnitker]

Dear Nvidia Maintainers,

I just upgraded 2 boxes with an 8400 GS graphic card to stretch. One of
them an AMD64 and one an i386 box.

Previously I had both boxes running with the latest kernel from BPO
together with nvidia-legacy-340 driver from BPO.

I am using DKMS.

Both of them run into trouble running the drivers after upgrading to
stretch.

The i386 box the first box, where the upgrade does not succeeded.

It was completely inaccessible with a nvidia driver installed. Screen
stays in flickering mode.

After running recovery mode and uninstalling nvidia --> nouveau driver
it was accessible again.

Then tried to figure out, why this happend and uninstalled nvidia on my
amd64 box too.

It was a little bit tricky to get nvidia stuff off the machine but I
didi it. One of the tricks was to switch to lightdm instead of gdm3.

With gdm3 the screen is on tty2 and not on tty1, but only visible, if
you swith with ALT/CTRL/3 to tty3 and back to tty2. :-)


Then installed nvidia stuff again, but unnecessaryly the "new" driver
stuff was installed too.

During this phase I could barely recognize, that the files
nvidia-modprobe.conf and nvidia-module.conf have to be altered. Change
kernelmodule from nvidia to nvidia-drm.

This was the only thing I could see, but the amd64 also went into
useless state with flickering screen.

uninstalling nvidia and using nouveau again helps.

From my point of view the configuration files in /etc with usage of
legacy modules shouldn't be altered.

This means, that we have with new and legacy modules occasionally
together installed a configuration which will not run nvidia acc. drivers.

Hopefully this can be confirmed by other users.

Next time i will try to load nvidia-legacy-340 only to see what will
happen.


AMD64 now:


Linux rocket2 4.9.0-3-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.9.30-2+deb9u2 (2017-06-26)
x86_64 GNU/Linux


sudo lspci -vk -s 05:00.0

05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G98 [GeForce 8400
GS Rev. 2] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] G98 [GeForce
8400 GS Rev. 2]
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 30, NUMA node 0
    Memory at fd000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
    Memory at d0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Memory at fa000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M]
    I/O ports at ec00 [size=128]
    Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3
    Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
    Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel
    Capabilities: [128] Power Budgeting <?>
    Capabilities: [600] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1
Len=024 <?>
    Kernel driver in use: nouveau
    Kernel modules: nouveau


i386:

sudo lspci -vk -s 01:00.0

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G98 [GeForce 8400
GS Rev. 2] (rev a1) (prog-if 00 [VGA controller])
    Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] G98 [GeForce
8400 GS Rev. 2]
    Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 35
    Memory at f6000000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16M]
    Memory at e0000000 (64-bit, prefetchable) [size=256M]
    Memory at f4000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=32M]
    I/O ports at cc00 [size=128]
    Expansion ROM at 000c0000 [disabled] [size=128K]
    Capabilities: [60] Power Management version 3
    Capabilities: [68] MSI: Enable+ Count=1/1 Maskable- 64bit+
    Capabilities: [78] Express Endpoint, MSI 00
    Capabilities: [100] Virtual Channel
    Capabilities: [128] Power Budgeting <?>
    Capabilities: [600] Vendor Specific Information: ID=0001 Rev=1
Len=024 <?>
    Kernel driver in use: nouveau
    Kernel modules: nouveau