Nouveau Driver Not Recognized in Ubuntu 16.04 NVIDIA GeForce 960

1

Hello Mario and PTB Community,


I am having issue getting PTB to recognize the video driver on an  experiment computer with the following specifications:


Make: Asus Desktop

GPU: GeForce GTX 960 [GM206]

Driver: Nouveau (not sure how to check what version specifically)

Processor: Intel Core i5-4460

Graphics: Gallium 0.4 on llvmpipe (LLVM 3.8, 256 bits) (from "Details")

Memory: 8 GB

OS: Ubuntu 16.04 LTS


Setup:

Installed in the following order:

- MATLAB R2016b

- lowlatency-kernal

- Neurodebian ppa (Dartmouth mirror, Vanderbilt mirror seemed to give issue with 16.04)

- matlab-support

- matlab-psychtoolbox-3-nonfree

- matlab-psychtoolbox-3

- PsychLinuxConfiguration

- VBLSyncTest

Info: Connected to NVidia GM206 [GeForce GTX 960] GPU of NV-110 family with 4 display heads. Beamposition timestamping enabled.

Warning: Your graphics driver doesn't allow me to control syncing wrt. vertical retrace!

Info: Seems like Psychtoolbox is runining inside a Virtual Machine?

Warning: At least one test call for OpenML OML_sync_control extension failed!

Info: All display tests and calibrations disabled.


After running, MATLAB freezes and I must kill and restart it.


SecureBoot is disabled as well.


Additionally, XOrgConfCreator displays the following warning:

Could not identify your graphics driver. Will use modesetting driver as fallback.


Any ideas on how to fix this issue? Is there a different Nouveau driver that I could install manually that is recognized? Or is the issue with graphics card support?


Thank you in advance,


Brody DeSilva

The University of Alabama at Birmingham


2
On the GeForce 900 series (2nd generation Maxwell family) 3d hardware acceleration is not yet supported by the Linux 4.4 kernel shipping with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. That's why it seems to fall back to the software renderer, which is useless for our purpose.

You could upgrade to a more modern Linux 4.8 kernel which does support it. Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS will ship with a Linux 4.8 based kernel, ETA 1 week on 2nd February. After 2nd February a ...

sudo apt install linux-lowlatency-hwe-16.04

... will make sure to always upgrade your 16.04 system to the latest well tested (by Ubuntu/Canonical) kernel, which would be 4.8 atm.

A

sudo apt install linux-lowlatency-hwe-16.04-edge

would give you the same kernel already now. However, the "edge" stands for bleeding edge - You get the good new stuff up to 6 month earlier, but of course it also lacks up to 6 month of additional quality testing, so it's beta quality with potential problems.

However, currently nouveau will only be able to run a modern GeForce 900 series gpu at about 1/10th of its maximum performance for many graphics workloads, because NVidia is delaying the release of cryptographically signed firmware blobs which are needed to enable reclocking to higher performance.

So you can try if nouveau still meets your needs, but likely you will need to install the proprietary NVidia driver to use that gpu at good performance.

That's why i generally recommend AMD or Intel gpu's for vision science applications on Linux because at least throughout the last 10 years they usually had good open-source drivers which are well supported by AMD and Intel themselves, whereas NVidia is largely unhelpful wrt. open-source drivers. Their latest gpu's of the 900/1000 series are even designed at the hardware level to require cryptographically signed firmware by NVidia, making the performance and functionality of the open-source drivers increasingly dependent to the whims of NVidia.

-mario