Nouveau on Debian Buster

This is a brief note that is probably of no interest unless you arrived here via a search engine.

After installing Debian Buster on my Gigabyte Aero laptop I was getting hangs whenever I tried to start X, which tended to be followed by CPU soft lockups:

nouveau [...] Refused to change power state, currently in D3
nouveau [...] Refused to change power state, currently in D3
nouveau [...] Refused to change power state, currently in D3

Booting through the advanced/recovery mode in GRUB got me further, but it was still freezing regularly.

I was aiming to install the non-free nvidia-driver package. I was also installing nvidia-detect and it was triggering the above behaviour, where the entire system froze.

I found the solution in this comment on GitHub. Adding nouveau.runpm=0 as a kernel option let me actually get in and install the correct driver without any hangs. (I think it was second line from the bottom in the GRUB config after pressing “e”.)

After that driver fully installed, my GTX1060 is happy and I am running KDE as I intended.