Nouveau - May 2012 - still seeking way to recover card after cursor disappears or card locks up

A couple of weeks ago, I posted a question about how to recover
a card (an Asus ENGT430 card, which the box says is a GeForce GT
430, running Mageia 1 with kernel 2.6.38.8-server-10.mga) when
the cursor had disappeared or the card had locked up while exiting
X.  Thanks to Vincent Pelletier for for suggesting chvt.  That
command does work to change the console, just as Alt-Ctrl-F(n) for
1 <= n <= 12 does.  However, it does not recover a card to a fully
useful state.

A couple of days ago, I had two monitors working, and the card got
into a very odd state where one monitor would respond to chvt,
Alt-Ctrl-F(n), switching between X and a text console, and such,
but the other monitor was frozen.  Nothing involving chvt had any
effect on the unresponsive monitor.

Is there some other way to recover the card/driver to a useful
state?  Doing "shutdown -hF now" will do it, but that takes a long
time to being the system back up.

Is it considered safe to rmmod nouveau and then modprobe it back
again?  I have a diskless system with a different card I could try
that with to gain confidence if the list says it's safe to do that.

Thanks,

Robert Riches

On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Robert M. Riches Jr.
<rm.riches at jacob21819.net> wrote:
> Is it considered safe to rmmod nouveau and then modprobe it back
> again? ?I have a diskless system with a different card I could try
> that with to gain confidence if the list says it's safe to do that.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert Riches
> _______________________________________________
> Nouveau mailing list
> Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau
On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Robert M. Riches Jr.
<rm.riches at jacob21819.net> wrote:
> Is it considered safe to rmmod nouveau and then modprobe it back
> again? ?I have a diskless system with a different card I could try
> that with to gain confidence if the list says it's safe to do that.
>
> Thanks,
>
> Robert Riches
> _______________________________________________
> Nouveau mailing list
> Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau
I very doubt that rmmod and modprobe will help you in any way since
nouveau is KMS module and it stays in use the whole time. Something
will be broken anyway. But you can try and see what's happening, it
will not brick your card.

> Date: Wed, 30 May 2012 13:24:55 +0200
> From: Arvydas Sidorenko <asido4 at gmail.com>
> To: "Robert M. Riches Jr." <rm.riches at jacob21819.net>
> Cc: nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
>
> On Wed, May 30, 2012 at 6:25 AM, Robert M. Riches Jr.
> <rm.riches at jacob21819.net> wrote:
> > Is it considered safe to rmmod nouveau and then modprobe it back
> > again? ?I have a diskless system with a different card I could try
> > that with to gain confidence if the list says it's safe to do
that.
> >
> > Thanks,
> >
> > Robert Riches
> > _______________________________________________
> > Nouveau mailing list
> > Nouveau at lists.freedesktop.org
> > http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/nouveau
>
> I very doubt that rmmod and modprobe will help you in any way since
> nouveau is KMS module and it stays in use the whole time. Something
> will be broken anyway. But you can try and see what's happening, it
> will not brick your card.
Arvydas, thank you very much for that info/advice.  You were
100% right that rmmod refused to remove the nouveau module.

Is there any other way to force a reset of a graphics card or
driver module other than OS shutdown/reboot?

Thanks,

Robert Riches

Wow!  Thank you Ben and Pekka for the responses.  I have them
at the ready for the next time the system misbehaves.  In my
case, once the card locks up, I'm already blind, so I have
been using ssh to log in from another machine.

Thanks again!

Robert Riches