On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 3:43 PM, Henri Sivonen <hsivo...@hsivonen.fi> wrote: > On Wed, Jul 6, 2016 at 2:42 AM, Gregory Szorc <g...@mozilla.com> wrote: >> The Lenovo ThinkStation P710 is a good starting point ( >> http://shop.lenovo.com/us/en/workstations/thinkstation/p-series/p710/). > > To help others who follow the above advice save some time: > > Xeons don't have Intel integrated GPUs, so one has to figure how to > get this up and running with a discrete GPU. In the case of Nvidia > Quadro M2000, the latest Ubuntu and Fedora install images don't work. > > This works: > Disable or enable the TPM. (By default, it's in a mode where the > kernel can see it but it doesn't work. It should either be hidden or > be allowed to work.) > Disable secure boot. (Nvidia's proprietary drivers don't work with > secure boot enabled.) > Use the Ubuntu 16.04.1 install image (i.e. intentionally old > image--you can upgrade later) > After installing, edit /etc/default/grub and set > GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="" (i.e. make the string empty; without > this, the nvidia proprietary driver conflicts with LUKS pass phrase > input). > update-initramfs -u > update-grub > apt install nvidia-375 > Then upgrade the rest. Even rolling forward the HWE stack works > *after* the above steps.
Xenial set up according to the above steps managed to make itself unbootable. I don't know why, but I suspect the nvidia proprietary driver somehow fell out of use and nouveau froze. The symptom is that a warning triangle (triangle with an exclamation mark) shows up in the upper right part of the front panel and the light of the topmost USB port in the front panel starts blinking. Turning the computer off isn't enough to get rid of the warning triangle and the blinking USB port light. To get rid of those, disconnect the power cord for a while and then plug it back in. After the warning triangle is gone, it's possible to boot Ubuntu 16.04.1 or 17.10 from USB to mount the root volume and make a backup of the files onto an external disk. Ubuntu 17.10 now boots on the hardware with nouveau with 3D enabled (whereas 16.04.1 was 2D-only and the versions in between were broken). However, before the boot completes, it seems to hang with the text: [Firmware Bug]: TSC_DEADLINE disabled due to Errata: please update microcode to version: 0xb000020 (or later) nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bus: MMIO write of 0888812c FAULT at 10eb14 [ IBUS ] Wait for a while. (I didn't time it, but the wait time is on the order of half a minute to a couple of minutes.) Then the boot resumes. The BIOS update from 2017-09-05 does not update the microcode to the version the kernel wants to see. However, once Ubuntu 17.10 has been installed, the intel-microcode package does. (It's probably a good idea to update the BIOS for AMT and TPM bug fixes anyway.) I left the box for installing proprietary drivers during installation unchecked. I'm not sure it checking the box would install the nvidia proprietary drivers, but the point of going with 17.10 instead starting with 16.04.1 again is to use nouveau for OpenGL and avoid the integration problems with the nvidia propriatery drivers. The wait time during boot repeats with the installed system, but during the wait, there's no text on the screen by default. Just wait. On this system, with Ubuntu 17.10, nouveau seems to even qualify for WebGL2 in Firefox. There's a huge downside, though: If the screen stops consuming the DisplayPort data stream, the graphical session gets killed! So if you do normal things like turn the screen off or switch input on a multi-input screen, your graphical session is no longer there when you come back and you get a login screen instead! (I haven't yet formed an opinion on whether this behavior can be lived with or not.) This applies to the live session on the install media, too. Therefore, it's best to use another virtual console (ctrl-alt-F3) for restoring backups. (GUI is now some weird dual existence in ctrl-alt-F1 and ctrl-alt-F2.) (Fedora 26 still doesn't boot on this hardware. I didn't try Fedora 27 beta.) P.S. It would be good for productivity if Mozilla issued slightly less cutting-edge Nvidia GPUs to developers to increase the probability that support in nouveau has had time to bake. -- Henri Sivonen hsivo...@hsivonen.fi https://hsivonen.fi/ _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
