Dual boot with Windows 10 and Debian 8. Why Debian freezes after seconds?

Question

I want to have both Windows and Debian on my laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad W540).

Windows 10 Pro should be the primary OS and Debian the secondary OS. Just for bootloader configuration.

I have the following configuration setup in my BIOS:

UEFI/Legacy Boot: Both
 - UEFI/Legacy Boot Priority: UEFI First
 - CSM Support: Yes
Secure Boot: Disabled

First I had installed Windows on the empty SSD. I left 100 GB of space at the end unallocated for the Debian installation.

Second I had installed (UEFI installer came up) Debian 8.7.1 using LXDE CD-1 without network connection. I had created a second EFI partition as well as /boot and LVM partitions within the 100 GB unallocated area. Beside /boot (ext2) all file systems are BTRFS. I had installed GRUB without "Force grub-efi installation to the removable media path" option.

Now the laptop will start with the Debian GRUB bootloader which is showing the Debian and Windows installation.

When I select Windows, I can work as normal. No limitations have been discovered yet.

When I select Debian, it taks at most 10 seconds until the laptop freezes completely. I have to push hardware power button for 10 seconds to turn off the machine and continue working.

I cannot supply with the actual logs due to I am not so fast (10 seconds) to login, mount USB storage and copy logs. But I have written it down (may contains typos):

nouveau E[PBUS] MMIO read of 0x00000000 FAULT at 0x400700 [ IBUS ]
nouveau E[PGRAPH] HUB_INIT timed out
...
nouveau E[PGRAPH] (various done, start and stat messages)
...
nouveau E[PGRAPH] init failed, -16
nouveau E[DRM] failed to idle channel 0xcccc0000 [DRM]
INFO: rcu_sched detected stalls on CPUs/tasks

Using Google to find a solution I found one SF post that states adding nosmp to GRUB config would solve it. But for me it did not make a difference.

Why is Debian freezing? How to fix this?

Answer 1

The issue is not with the dual boot setup.

The issue is that the open source driver (nouveau) for the graphics card (nVidia Quadro K2100M with nVidia Optimus) is causing this freezes.

To have a quick workaround I disabled nouveau and related modules like advised on this AU question and answer.

/etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf

blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
blacklist amd76x_edac #this might not be required for x86 32 bit users.
blacklist vga16fb
blacklist rivafb
blacklist nvidiafb
blacklist rivatv
options nouveau modeset=0
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off

Next ist to build the original nVidia driver for my graphics card and install it.