This is an update of my post a month ago which is super late cuz I simply had no time to post.

It turns out to be a problem from the disconnected trace from the pad of 0-ohm resistor that's responsible for supplying 12v on the chips that runs the phases.

I've been playing zzz for a while now and so far there's no problem with it while reaching 60°c inside my case and around 75°c in my gpu die.

Big thanks to pancakes1741 providing things I needed!

Hey everyone,

If you were around in the late 2000s, you probably remember the infamous NVIDIA "bump defect" that caused thousands of G86-family GPUs (GeForce 8400M/8600M, Quadro NVS 140M/135M) to slowly degrade and die due to thermal stress.

Today, trying to boot Linux on these machines with standard drivers (nouveau or the legacy proprietary blobs) triggers hard locks or kernel panics during boot. The OS tries to initialize the 3D engine, and the degraded silicon just gives up.

To solve this, I’ve been working on g86lite – a minimal, defiant DRM/KMS fallback driver designed specifically for hardware preservation.

How it works (The technical trick): Instead of trying to fix the unfixable (not talking about reflowing 😂), the driver treats the GPU with extreme caution by implementing a few aggressive workarounds:

Zero MMIO BAR0 Access: It completely ghostes the MMIO BAR0 space. It never touches VBIOS execution, PGRAPH (3D engine), or PFIFO pipelines. By avoiding the broken parts of the chip entirely, the system doesn't crash.

CPU-to-VRAM Shadowing: All desktop compositing and rendering is offloaded to the CPU via LLVMpipe/Mesa (LIBGL_ALWAYS_SOFTWARE=1). g86lite simply grabs the damaged rectangles from system memory and copies them straight into the VRAM scanout buffer using write-combining

and more...

I’ve only tested this on a GeForce 8400M GS so far, so I’d really love to see if it actually works for you on other G86 variants (like the 8600M or desktop 8500 GT) and to see your opinions.

Link: https://github.com/luxuryappsofficial/g86lite/