Dear kali developers and greetings,
First let me say I appreciate your efforts in making Kali a more bug-free and pleasant to use environment. I believe
this costs to all of you very hard work and proper dedication, and I believe you rarely get much credit for it.
I'm writing regarding an issue that has always seemed to be a problem for Kali to handle - a notebook with an ultra hd
resolution support and a touch screen, running a geforce gtx960m card. As of the last updates even the live 2018.2 version
would not run, below I'll be describing as much details as I could. Please note that I have tried all possible variations, including
nouveau driver, nvidia drivers from the repistories, nvidia official drivers, disabling nouveau and counting on the integrated
graphics driver (i915) and vice-versa. The result is either a gdm loop or a kernel crash, somehow related to the nouveau driver. When
trying to boot from the live 2018.2 cd I get an error like this one:
nouveau 0000:02:00.0: refused to change power, currently in d3
The above message occurs when I try to use a regular Kali OS as well, even after rebooting the box using the "reboot" binary and
it's followed by an immediate kernel crash. I used to have a system with a working GPU configuration up to kernel 4.11 I believe,
and with kernel 4.9 along with some of the official nvidia drivers (not all of them worked).
The issues, by my personal opinion, based on comparsion factors and observations during gdm updates, are either related to:
- kali's inability to handle ultra hd resolutions (3840 x 2160 pixels)
- dual gpu configurations
- combination of the above listed (both dual gpu and resolution issue)
- it may be a touch screen related problem, similar to this one: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=237288
What I'm trying to do is get back to a gdm environment with any driver, as gdm is not starting at all on my notebook with the 2018.2 version.
It's all happening as well with the last upgrades from the repistories (last tried yesterday), not just with the official 2018.2 image.
The kernel crash happens either upon boot/reboot, most likely when something related to the GPU state is triggered.
These are some of the errors I managed to write down:
(kernel 4.16, applies to 4.11 as well)
(nouveau crashes kernel on reboot although gdm is not even running)
Call Trace:
nv04_timer_read+0x2f/0x60 [ouveau]
nkvm_pmu_reset+0x62/0x160 [nouveau]
nkvm_udevice_init+0x41/0x60 [nouveau]
nkvm_object_init+0x3d/0x180 [nouveau]
nkvm_object_init+0xa0/0x180 [nouveau]
nkvm_object_init+0xa0/0x180 [nouveau]
Live 2018.2 version: [nouveau] refused to change power state, crashes kernel
error :
nouveau 0000:02:00.0: refused to change power, currently in d3
Similar issue to this:
https://forums.kali.org/showthread.php?38595-problem-with-running-kali-after-GRUB
(As I'm getting Pointer to TMDS table invalid on boot as well) - Solution about nomodeset didnt work.
I'm also attaching some of the logs from syslog, system messages and xorg, both using the official nvidia driver and what might be considered relevant.
I tried to follow your guidelines as much as I could, so if you need any additional information please let me know.
The notebook I'm using is Dell Inspiron 15 7559 with a dual GPU configuration (integrated intel graphics and nvidia geforce gtx960m) with touch features.
Once again, I believe the issues are related to the ultrahd resolution that it supports, but it will be up to you to decide whether I'm pointing you in the right direction.
I would be grateful if someone could be addressing the issue soon so Kali could become useful on my box again :) Thanks for reading all this! | 
