Debian SID fails to start Nouveau display

At work I have a NVidia AD107 card in my PC. After updating Debian SID to linux-image-6.12.38+deb13-amd64 and later to linux-image-6.16.3+deb14-amd64 it failed to start the graphical interface.

After a lot of debugging I found that the nouveu kernel module was missing a firemware binary file:

kernel: nouveau NVIDIA AD107 (197000a1)
kernel: nouveau firmware: failed to load nvidia/ad107/gsp/gsp-570.144.bin (-2)
kernel: nouveau firmware: failed to load nvidia/ad107/gsp/gsp-570.144.bin (-2)
kernel: nouveau firmware: failed to load nvidia/ad107/gsp/gsp-570.144.bin (-2)
kernel: nouveau firmware: failed to load nvidia/ad107/gsp/gsp-535.113.01.bin (-2)
kernel: nouveau firmware: failed to load nvidia/ad107/gsp/gsp-535.113.01.bin (-2)
kernel: nouveau firmware: failed to load nvidia/ad107/gsp/gsp-535.113.01.bin (-2)

After some more digging I found that this firemware blob is required by a new nouveau version: https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/firmware/linux-firmware.git/commit/?id=050f0a1e3a76d671c073b59c813a4119b610b725

Long story short, Debian ships this blob in the firmware-nvidia-graphics package but it’s not linked into my ad107 folder 🙁

So let’s fix this:

~# cd /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107/
/usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107# ln -s ../ad102/gsp/

After a reboot my graphical userinterface worked again 🙂

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *