Font corruption in tty after boot + low resolution

Using the “nvidia-drm.modeset=1” kernel parameter, the terminals text will be bugged out. I remember this happening since this feature was introduced years ago. It happens at random. Some boots the text is fine, sometimes it’s corrupted.

Interesting. Can you please run sudo nvidia-bug-report.sh when the problem is reproducing (I know it’ll be hard to read, sorry) and attach the resulting nvidia-bug-report.log.gz file?

Do you ever see this kind of corruption if Xorg is running, or is it only at the console?

This only happens at the console. Wayland and X11 rendering is fine.

Here is the log when the bug occurs.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (196.4 KB)

Also, my console resolution is very low, it must be at 1024x768 or something. You can see by my screenshots. The Nouvea driver has the correct high resolution set when at the login prompt in the tty, and while using the console. Could you look and see if the log file has any info on fixing the low resolution too?

I think the low resolution thing is expected. The nouveau driver will allocate its own high-resolution framebuffer console and set a mode displaying that. The NVIDIA driver doesn’t do that for a couple of reasons: one, the driver doesn’t initialize the GPUs until a client opens them, and second, plugging in a framebuffer console prevents the nvidia kernel module from ever being unloaded. Many customers rely on being able to unload one version of the nvidia driver and install another one without having to reboot.

Instead, the nvidia driver looks at the framebuffer console that was set by the kernel or system firmware, and tries to restore that when graphical clients such as Xorg or Wayland exit. If you want a higher resolution at the console, you’ll need to get your system firmware to set a higher resolution at boot. For UEFI systems, you can often achieve this by disabling the boot menu in your bootloader (e.g. by changing the systemd-boot timeout to with the ‘t’ key or disabling the menu in GRUB).

I’ll try to take a look at your bug report log soon.

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I don’t use systemd or grub, so i’ll have to look at s6 and syslinux. The low resolution isn’t a big issue, but that text corruption is problematic. Thank you for the info.

Here’s some neofetch screenshots.

Here is a more up to date log.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (216.3 KB)

Thanks for the reports. For future reference, I filed internal bug number 3158900 for tracking this.

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