UEFI/CURRENT: vt() and nVidia BLOB: not working on nVidia GT 740M

[Nathan Whitehorn]

On 09/18/14 04:18, O. Hartmann wrote:
> Running FreeBSD 11.0-CURRENT #5 r271728: Thu Sep 18 01:18:25 CEST 2014 amd64 on a Lenovo
> ThinkPad Edge E540 laptop with built-in nVidida GT 740M GPU (NV208M) doesn't bring up X11
> even with most recent nVidia  BLOB 343.13.
>
> The system has been installed from a most recent FBSD CURRENT USB drive image and uses
> UEFI and newcons/vt(). IN UEFI Firmware, the primary GPU selected is the nVidia GT 740M
> in favour of the Intel iGPU HD4600 of the Haswell CPU.
>
> While the system works well with console only after UEFI boot, I can not start X11 having
> driver "nvidia" enabled, the portion in xorg.conf reflecting this is as follows:
>
> Section "Device"
>          Identifier      "Card0"
>          VendorName      "nVidia"
>          BoardName       "GT740M"
>          Driver          "nvidia"
>          BusID           "PCI:1:0:0"
> EndSection
>
> When starting X, the screen goes blank and black with a stuck mousepointer showing up and
> a green (colour defined in my console) carret showing in the left hand upper corner of the
> screen - and nothing happens anymore.
>
> Using driver "nv" from the regular xorg installation from the ports (having set
> WITH_NEW_XORG=          YES
> WITH_KMS=               YES
> WITH_GALLIUM=           YES
> in /etc/make.conf) fails with the error, that the driver doesn't recognises the GPU type.
>
> The only working solution is the very slow and unusable x11-drivers/xf86-video-scfb
> unaccelerated software framebuffer.
>
> I'd like to use the accelerated nVidia GPU with the BLOB as I do on all other FreeBSD
> boxes I use (systems still without UEFI and graphical vt()).
>
> What am I doing wrong here?
>
> Has someone successfully bootet FBSD CURRENT via EUFI and nVidia accelerated GPU via
> nVidia's BLOB?
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Oliver

I'm using UEFI and the blob every day without issue. However, that is 
with an add-in card. It's possible that X11 or the nVidia driver is 
trying to reinitialize the card through the (potentially non-existant) 
video BIOS, which fails. Is there any option like "NoInt10" you can turn 
on in X configuration?
-Nathan