nouveau driver's memory problem

[isadora]

Reported bug:
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=10961

It has BEGUN happening just three weeks ago, and continuously occurred several times.

It randomly occurred, but mostly when I open some PDF/DJVU files with Okular.

*some 'glitches' appear on the screen.
*some characters, graphics are not display correctly:
example: in 'Title bar' of Gwenview, the character '4' is displayed as 'C', '3' is displayed as '4', etc.
*sometimes, some components go black, no text

I must close Okular, some applications, or reboot to return the normal state.

Official (non-free) Nvidia driver does not have this problem.

Here is what (stripped) dmesg shows:

Code: Select all

[ 3581.204389] [TTM] Failed to find memory space for buffer 0xffff880019baa000 eviction
[ 3581.204397] [TTM] No space for ffff880019baa000 (646 pages, 2584K, 2M)
[ 3581.204400] [TTM]   placement[0]=0x00070002 (1)
[ 3581.204401] [TTM]     has_type: 1
[ 3581.204403] [TTM]     use_type: 1
[ 3581.204404] [TTM]     flags: 0x0000000A
[ 3581.204405] [TTM]     gpu_offset: 0x00000000
[ 3581.204407] [TTM]     size: 131072
[ 3581.204408] [TTM]     available_caching: 0x00070000
[ 3581.204410] [TTM]     default_caching: 0x00010000
[ 3581.204414] nouveau E[     DRM] fail ttm_validate
[ 3581.204416] nouveau E[     DRM] validate vram_list
[ 3581.204421] nouveau E[     DRM] validate: -12

[isadora]

~topic moved by moderator

[jiml8]

Under any circumstances, why would you use the nouveau driver instead of the nvidia driver?

Also, that the problem occurs on one driver and not the other does not necessarily implicate the driver. I run the nvidia driver (downloaded and compiled from nvidia) and I have established that there is a memory leak apparently in X. At least, it shows up as being in X...

The error messages you show suggest you are out of memory period. So how much RAM is in your system, and how much swap? What processor do you have?

When you encounter these effects, what do you see for memory usage when you run the top command from a CLI?

What is the MemTotal and MemFree when you do a "cat /proc/meminfo" ?

After checking memory as above, su to root and issue this command (without the quotes): "sync; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches"

After doing this, once again do a cat /proc/meminfo and see what has happened to MemFree.

Run the command vmstat and see what it has to say about your swapfile situation.

Okular can take up a lot of space, and PDFs can suck your RAM. I'm guessing you are short of RAM to begin with; these commands will give you a handle on that.

[metalinx]

Thanks!

* nouveau driver is faster, uses less RAM and CPU. I don't need much visual effect so I don't need Nvidia driver.
* I thought that I have bad RAM sticks, but tested without error. When problem occurred, there are plenty of free memory. Strange, that, I have encountered this (may be) only with Okular, no matter how many free RAM.
* I have 4 GiB RAM, no swap.
* I have run Mageia 2 before (with the same hardware), and Mageia 3 for about 2 months without this problem, I only experienced this only 2, 3 weeks ago. Also, I have noted that it randomly happens, sometimes I did the same things without problem.