[regression] TTY screens corrupted on GeForce 7800 GTX with 304.84 driver

After upgrading to the 304.84 driver, the display of my virtual terminals (TTY) is all messed up. I can still type commands, but I can’t see them. Instead, all I see is a black screen with a blue cursor and blue vertical lines (screenshot). If I downgrade to the 304.64 driver, the virtual terminals appear correctly. The report generated by nvidia-bug-report.sh only includes this uname line:

Linux sulley 3.2.0-38-generic #61-Ubuntu SMP Tue Feb 19 12:18:21 UTC 2013 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Here is my system info:

OS: Kubuntu 12.04 64-bit w/ KDE SC 4.10.1 (from Kubuntu backports PPA)
Motherboard: ASRock X58 Extreme3 (Intel X58 chipset)
CPU: Intel Core i7 930 (2.8 GHz quad-core)
RAM: 12GB DDR3
Video: Dell NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GTX w/ 256 MB RAM (PCI Express)
Linux Kernel: 3.2.0-38-generic

He’s not the only one…

304.84 - X works fine, but terminals/shells don’t

Two displays: a CRT Samsung and a DFP Hp (separate X screens).

When Ctrl+Alt+F1 are pressed the DFP display is deactivated
while the CRT shows blue/green squares/lines.

Trying a different tty one only gets two black screens

(When Alt+F7 are pressed X works fine again)


openSUSE 12.1 (i586)
KDE: 3.5.10 “release 230” (yes KDE3, no mistake)
Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.53GHz
GeForce 6600 GT (0x00F2) AGP 256 MB
Linux 3.1.10-1.19-default i686

It looks like i’ve got the same problem.

Oftentimes NVIDIA drivers don’t work well with non 80x25 consoles, so try booting with vga=normal - hopefully it will fix your problem.

vga=normal causes the boot to happen in text mode instead of the graphical splash screen. However, after X comes up, the virtual terminals are still broken, only this time instead of blue lines and a blue cursor, I get a black screen and an oversized flashing white cursor about halfway toward the center of the screen.

…there are several user reporting this, with and without text consoles.

vga=normal is not an acceptable solution and it does not work anyway
(mrbumpy409 has just described what happens if one uses that boot option)

304.84 are unfortunately bugged.

Internally filed bug 1253579 to track this issue .

304.64 is working here on a Kubuntu 12.04 7950GT install.

Thanks to everyone for posting and working on this.

I’ve got the same problem with a GTX Titan, i7-3770 that I’m using for CUDA, so not being able to escape to the TTY to run the CUDA is kind of a problem!! (wink) I’m on Ubuntu 11.10 b/c that’s what CUDA said it wanted, with NVIDIA 313.26 and CUDA Toolkit 5.0, all created earlier this week. [url]http://justpaste.it/275m[/url] from my sudo nvidia-bug-report.sh, hope it helps.

I can confirm that 304.84 breaks on a GeForce 7950 GT (3.7.10-gentoo #3 SMP Mon Mar 18 01:08:52 PDT 2013 x86_64 AMD Phenom™ II X4 810 Processor AuthenticAMD GNU/Linux).

I have the same problem on ubuntu 12.04 with nvidia 304.84 and kernel 3.2.0-38. It repeats with next kernel 3.2.0-39 too.

nVidia 304.88 and kernel 3.2.0-40
Now all tty (Ctrl F1-F6) work!!!