I've installed Debian 11 with dual boot on a laptop of mine lately. I installed the official image, so no non-free drivers got installed.
I had some driver issues reported when using dmesg
(I think one was the bluetooth) and I seemed to have fixed them by installing some packages (I copied the failing driver name from dmesg
, searched it with apt, and installed the best match).
At some point I've decided to add the contrib
and non-free
sources to my sources list, to see if getting non-free drivers would improve anything:
https://www.xmodulo.com/install-nonfree-packages-debian.html
I was getting errors from the nouveau driver before that too (despite the fact that my screen was using the full resolution), so I was just trying to make the errors go away.
I've tried the nvidia-detect
utility and after installing its suggestion my resolution dropped and wouldn't be set to a higher one. So, I've uninstalled that.
I've also tried the instructions here: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers#Debian_11_.22Bullseye.22 Again, my resolution dropped.
I think that, in both cases I've installed a legacy driver (most likely nvidia-legacy-390xx-driver
).
My graphics card seem to be a GA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [GeForce GT 540M] (rev a1)
.
Eventually, I have uninstalled what I had installed (hopefully - not sure if anything stayed behind...) and my resolution is now restored, but I still get the same errors in dmesg
:
[ 14.913827] Bluetooth: Can't change to loading configuration err
[ 14.913943] ath3k: probe of 1-1.5:1.0 failed with error -110
[ 37.345865] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nvc1_fuc084 (-2)
[ 37.345872] firmware_class: See https://wiki.debian.org/Firmware for information about missing firmware
[ 37.345876] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nvc1_fuc084 failed with error -2
[ 37.345892] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: firmware: failed to load nouveau/nvc1_fuc084d (-2)
[ 37.345895] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nvc1_fuc084d failed with error -2
[ 37.345898] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: msvld: unable to load firmware data
[ 37.345901] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: msvld: init failed, -19
These seem to be the only remaining errors.
If we exclude the bluetooth one at the top (which I have no idea why it happens), you see the failing nouveau driver afterwards.
And I am a bit confused by it really, because (from my understanding) the nouveau driver is supposed to be shipped with the kernel. So, why would it fail? How could there be a missing dependency to it or anything like that?
I think I also tried installing it (nouveau) with apt, but nothing got installed. Not sure what would happen if one of its dependencies was the wrong version (if it would be replaced or not). I guess it would be replaced if the existing binary is an older version, but I am not sure about that.
So, if anyone has any idea what I could do, feel free to drop his ideas. This is my first time dealing with Linux drivers, so I am a bit clueless.
For sure, I could just ignore the problem, since my screen seems to work fine.
Just, I can't unsterstand what is going on here... If the driver doesn't load, why is my screen working OK?