3.14 kernel and nvidia

Just a little rant about a problem I am currently having.

This is an issue that only seem to affect laptops with nvidia GPU, and only with the proprietary nvidia drivers. Some people get a black screen when starting x, and a few others, like me, actually have our laptop powering off when starting x.

This is the exact same problem that started when the 3.10 kernel came out, but seemed to be fixed for most people with the 3.11.1 kernel. Now it is back in the 3.14 kernel, and currently nvidia claims it is caused by a bug in the kernel acpi calls. Others claim it is nvidia's inability to follow kernel development.

Topic on nvidia forums

At the moment I simply downgraded to the previous Arch kernel. I will be trying some different kernel boot options mentioned by others on the nvidia forums to see if it can solve the problem for me.

Following some solutions others have found, I can now successfully boot with the 3.14 kernel using two kernel boot options:

CONFIG_HZ=1000
rcutree.rcu_idle_gp_delay=1

So I can thankfully keep updating my Arch system.

I went ahead and removed the CONFIG_HZ=1000 boot option, and I am still able to boot up and startx without issues. I first only included it because everyone seemed to mention it on the Nvidia forums. So it seems that it is the second boot option that makes the difference for me.

I will try booting without it on each kernel update and post any changes on the nvidia forums in the hope that nvidia devs find the problem. Thankfully there are a lot of other people looking deeper than me as well. This is one bug I would like to see buried because when it first appears 7-8 months ago it gave me quite a fright. I thought my laptop had died permanently. It powered off, with a pop coming from the laptop speakers. Also at the time this solution was not discovered by anyone, so I had to avoid updating my kernel until the 3.11.1 kernel was out, which was well over a month.

The whole root of this issue seem to be optimus capable hardware. My laptop does not have an intel gpu in addition to the nvidia card, a couple of other people on Arch forums with similar laptops had the same problem with the laptop powering off. Others that have a usable intel gpu as well, and were using bumblebee, just had a black screen upon starting x. Those that were using nouveau drivers had no issues at all, and this prompted the some of the non-gamers to switch to nouveau.

This is obviously not something that only affects the Arch kernel, as gentoo users have reported the same problem. So it is in the interest of all Linux users with nvidia laptops to have this fixed.

The filesystem can become corrupt as it is not properly unmounted prior to shutting down. Thankfully this has not caused any issues for me yet, probably because there is not much running on my system before I issue the startx command.