Strange failure, probably video card

[Nils Kassube]

Kevin O'Gorman wrote:
> Kernel is 2.8.0-31-generic SMP x86_64 (amd 4-core)

I suppose you mean 3.8.0-31 ... that would be the lts-raring kernel of 
Ubuntu 12.04 (although the latest lts-raring kernel is 3.8.0-34). Or are 
you using Ubuntu 13.04?

> I don't think it's the driver because I have had this card for several
> years, but the log messages started just a week or so ago.

Agreed, that looks suspicious, but it still might be triggered by some 
software upgrade.

> However, I'm not sure how to even tell what driver I'm using, and I
> fool around with many things on this machine -- I don't remember what
> i did about drivers.

If you fool around ith many things, could it be that you were playing 
with virtualization when the problem started? The AMD-Vi error message 
seems to be related to virtualization / iommu (not that I know much 
about it, but that's what I found when searching for the error message).

> It may help to know that among the installed packages are
>   nvidia-304
>   xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
>   nvidia-settings-304

Then you probably have the proprietary nvidia driver in use. You can 
check it with the command

lsmod|grep nvidia

if it shows "nvidia" it is the proprietary driver, if it returns 
nothing, it is the "nouveau" driver.

Actually I have the same video card and also the lts-raring kernel in 
this machine. I think I had some problem with the nvidia-304 package and 
therefore I installed the nvidia-304-updates package. I don't see your 
error messages in the logs, but I don't have two monitors and I have an 
Intel CPU.


Nils