Howdy y'all,

Slackware 14 (x86_64) will not work with nVidia GTX 560 Ti out of the box. The DRM modesetting will break and freeze with the last thing seen before the screen blanks out is some error message with the code 0x8ED6.

I was able to get to a prompt using nouveau.modeset = 0 at lilo / boot-time and once I got a nice terminal I recompiled the kernel (using Slackware's .config) file to the latest one at the time of writing (3.6.9).

With the latest kernel it works all good but I'm a bit concerned that it didn't with the shipped one. Later today I will try the testing kernels provided but if I recall correctly those didn't work either.

Did anybody else experience similar difficulties? Would be nice to find a solution which IMHO should be included as an update in -current. Also would be nice to hear some ideas on how to solve the problem without recompiling the entire kernel (my solution was extreme but worked nonetheless).

I read a bit on the nouveau site that this family of nVidia cards are apparently supported (NVC0 family) so am wondering is the old kernel / nouveau really the problem. The nouvau wiki says: "It is recommended to use the Linux 3.1 kernel or newer (or a backported driver from this kernel)." for the NVC0 family.

Did you try the official nVidia driver? Maybe it's just a hardware issue.

As an alternative to building a kernel, there is always the possibility of making an out-of-tree build of the nouveau kernel module, see § 2.2 here. Just check that the running kernel be recent enough as told.

In addition, you could wish to upgrade the nouveau X kernel module. To do that you would just have to grab the most recent tarball here and use xf86-video-nouveau.Slackbuild in /testing to build a new package. This usually works, but in some cases you would have to upgrade some other components as well, libdrm and mesa being the usual culprits. But, I digress...

As for updating -current every time a device is better supported by some kernel module, that is not very realistic IMHO as that would mean updating -current every time a new mainline kernel is released.

I would just compile new stable versions of libdrm, xf86-video-nouveau, mesa, and glu (for mesa 9.0.x).