[conspire] Video corruption on Xubunu/Nvidia (was: Happy New Preferred Application!)

[Rick Moen]

Hi, Roger.  Just a follow-up to recap some of what you and the CABAL
brain trust discussed during this evening's CABAL meeting.

Quoting rogerchrisman at gmail.com (rogerchrisman at gmail.com):

> lspci:
> 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GM107
> [GeForce GTX 750 Ti] [10de:1380] (rev a2)
> Subsystem: eVga.com. Corp. GM107 [GeForce GTX 750 Ti] [3842:3751]
> Kernel driver in use: nouveau
> Kernel modules: nvidiafb, nouveau
> 
> Settings > Display: 2560x1440 60Hz, I see which is correct for my 27
> inch display I think.
> 
> Has anyone else been experiencing corruption of the display image into
> a wash of tiny rectangles, seemingly at random after several hours of
> successfully using your system?

This bit of nastiness sounds like it could be either a hardware problem
or a hardware one.  Josef, who likewise has experience with
recent-vintage, gaming-friendly Nvidia video chipsets, advises that it's
sadly common for the open-source "nouveau' X.org drivers to be not quite
good enough with relatively cutting-edge Nvidia video chips, especially
at higher resolutions.  So, he strongly recommends following any of a
number of online guides for enabling *buntu package access to Nividia's
proprietary drivers instead, and installing and switching over to them.
Here's one I found, that Josef vouches for:
https://linuxize.com/post/how-to-nvidia-drivers-on-ubuntu-20-04/

There's a reasonable chance that making that change (and rebooting) will
make your problem go away.  (To be clear, the problem is that Nvidia
Corporation is notoriously _uncooperative_ with the open source
community, such that each Nvidia video chip is a big challenge for the
open source coders, requiring years of work to reverse-engineer and
develop good drivers for.

If that does _not_ make your problem go away, logically we return to
basics, and, in your shoes, I'd want to do a quick test to see whether
the root cause lies in hardware or software.  For twenty years, we of
the Linux community have had a good class of tool for that question:
live distros.  

Which is to say, if you put a really cutting-edge Linux live distro onto
a USB drive and boot from it in 'live' (not installed) mode, and if your
problem vanishes, then you can reasonably conclude the root problem
cause lies somewhere in (some aspect of) your installed Xubuntu system,
given that the problem went away the moment you were no longer running
Xubuntu.  On the other hand, if you are still able to reproduce your
problem, even though you're using a very different and very cutting-edge
operating system booted from different media from what you usually use,
then you can semi-confidently conclude that the root cause lies in
hardware, e.g., overheating of your video circuitry.

Anyway, I hope that helps.