nouveau E[ drm] gpu lockup switching to software fbcon"

[Greshman]

Hello I am receiving the message:

nouveau E[ drm] gpu lockup switching to software fbcon"

My guess is that it is a Nvidia driver issue. I have a Nvidia GTX 590.
I am very new to Linux so if anyone knows how to fix this issue, please explain in easy to understand language. The operating system freezes after a 30 second period almost everytime i boot the operating system.

[dobbi]

I have the same problem, but I am using a 3.14.8 kernel as my solution,
Others have removed the Nvidia or Nouveau driver, I think you just need to blacklist it, just don't forget to remake the initframfs there is a copy of it in there that needs to be removed.

Those work, now for the experimental, you can try acpi=off and see if it works and stop locking up.

[Ahmad Samir]

This is a common issue with the open-source nouveau driver; there's a good chance the nvidia proprietary driver will work better for you, the nvidia driver is available in the Rpm Fusion repos:
http://rpmfusion.org/

after you add the Rpm Fusion repos, you can install the nvidia driver:
http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia

[Dutchy]

Yup, it does those sort of things now and then.
Seems to slowly become less though.

[Greshman]

can you tell me what I have to do to blacklist the nouveau driver? I saw this code online.

Verify Nouveau is not loaded

lsmod | grep nouveau

We need to disable Nouveau. Try a one-time blacklisting from the GRUB command line before creating a permanent blacklist rule.

In the boot menu, edit the Fedora boot line, and add to the kernel (linux) entry the following string:

rdblacklist=nouveau.

Resume the boot. If the system enters the graphical session, and the Nvidia driver is properly loaded, then all is well. You will just need to add a manual rule that blacklists Nouveau from loading. Again, this can be done permanently by editing the GRUB command line, or by creating a module blacklist rule. For the first, you have more than extremely detailed GRUB and GRUB2 tutorials to get the desired results.

For the second, here's how it's done - backup and new initramfs creation:

mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img \
/boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).bak.img
dracut --omit-drivers nouveau \
/boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

This method will have to be executed every time there's a kernel update. A more elegant way is a permanent blacklist. Every time dracut runs, it will consult the following list and make the necessary exceptions when creating the initramfs image. Of course, you will need to make the initramfs file the first time after creating the blacklist rule. Personally, I recommend the GRUB change, because it is so very easily reversible. And don't forget backups, because if something goes wrong, you will be able to recover easily.

echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
ln -s /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf \
/usr/lib/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)