nvidia Freeze-up with kernel 2.4.22-r5 and later

davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

I have searched through this site, and cannot find an answer that matches my circumstances.

I recently upgraded my kernel from 2.4.20-r8 to 2.4.22-r5. I had to recompile anyway, as I wanted to install ALSA, and correct one or two errors in my previous kernel, in that I had DMA set up wrongly, and I had to change the Sound settings.

The upshot is that when I run the new kernel with the NVIDIA driver, my KDE 3.2 desktop comes up and after a few seconds, everything freezes, that is, the keyboard and mouse buttons do not respond, the mouse pointer still moves, though it keeps the form it had at the point everything else froze, the clock display does not move and icons do not react to having the mouse pointer over them.

All this happened straight after I installed the new kernel. BEFORE I had installed ALSA (which works fine, by the way).

I have a GeForce 4/MX440 64Mb video card plugged in to a PC Chips M810 motherboard. Using the nv driver everything seems fine, however, there is a slight problem that it seems to use a 1278x1024 display instead of 1280x1024 (ie I get 2 usused columns of pixels on the screen so I am sure there will a little distortion somewhere on the screen though I cannot see it at the moment). And as the nv driver does not support GL, I can't play emilia-pinball, which is important to me.

Given my mobo-video card combination, are there entries in the kernel configurator that I must have and others that are best avoided? Any help would be appreciated.
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maloo38 · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 32 Location: Australia

You may have the riva framebuffer module (rivafb) loaded.
I had a similar problem when it was loaded and I started X using the NVidia driver the display would lock up.

If it is loaded you can either rebuild your kernel without it (that is neither built in or as a module) or add rivafb to the /etc/hotplug/blacklist and reboot
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davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

Thanks, but it didn't work.

So far I have tried:

removing DRI support from kernel

adding: "pci=bios noapic acpi=off" to append in lilo

and in line with your suggestion I added rivafb to /etc/hotplug/blacklist.

Thing is I had the same version of nvidia's driver under kernel 2.4.20-r8 yet it worked with no problems.

I wonder if I should just go back to the earlier version of the kernel...

Any other ideas, anyone?
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maloo38 · n00b Joined: 13 Feb 2004 Posts: 32 Location: Australia

I am using 2.4.22-r3 of the kernel and the NVidia driver is working.
I had to downgrade to get vmware working.
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davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

Just downgraded back to 2.4.20-r8 and all seems well!

Just have to re emerge alsa-drivers now...

Thanks anyway.
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davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

Just upgraded to kernel-2.6.3-r1 and exactly the same thing is happening as I reported earlier.

The screen, keyboard and mouse buttons freeze but the mouse pointer keeps moving under the nvidia driver. No problems under nv driver.

Has anyone come up with an answer to this?
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Visseroth · Apprentice Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 291 Location: Idaho

no, emerge mm-sources, 2.6.4-rc2-mm1 Works well here!!!!
I had the some problems a while back with a old kernel version.
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davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

I tried the mm-kernel but it did not really make a lot of difference. It lasted a bit longer (in fact I was just getting excited and about to yell "you little beauty" or similar) but the same freeze occurred.

I tried looking at /var/log/messages and as I could access it from a separate boot directory, nothing had been added at the end. It was just recording key presses and stopped. No obvious error message.

Now I have a problem: As I don't really require superfast 3D acceleration I could unplug my nvidia card. But I do require basic GLX so I can play my precious pinball! This would mean I would be using the onboard SiS730 graphics. I would have to either downgrade my XFree from 4.3 to 4.2.1 or upgrade it to the 4.4 which Gentoo is not supporting!

Or stick with kernel 2.4.20 forever...
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Visseroth · Apprentice Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 291 Location: Idaho

not sure what to tell ya there davecs, but I am running a 7NJS nforce2 mobo with a nvidia chipset and a nvidia GF4 TI4200 video card and the problem has not occured as of yet. So I am quite happy.

davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

Yeah this problem is probably hardware related: when I switch the computer on there is a delay of several seconds before the Graphics card is detected and reports in, and when the fault I am describing has occurred, if I "soft off" the computer rather than "reset" it, then the card doesn't get detected and the machine locks on startup, unless I give it about 30 seconds before starting up again.

But since it only seems to affect kernels from 2.4.22 onwards, there has obviously been a change in something which has affected it.

The other problem is that the actual screen display I get with "nv" as opposed to "nvidia" is not quite as stable for some reason, even though they report identical HSync and VRefresh rates.

I originally set up Linux on the self same mobo and had no problems once I had learnt the basics, and I am sorely tempted to yank out nvidia!
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Visseroth · Apprentice Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 291 Location: Idaho

well surprisingly I am having simular problems now that I have updated t othe 2.6.5-rc1-mm1 kernel. I am unable to load the nvidia module, just the nv module. So it may verywell be a software issue.

davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

I have now yanked out my nvidia card because it is too frustrating.

I am going to have to reformat my new partition and start again as I have b0rked it somewhere along the line, probably because I tried to change things too far down the road. I will try Thomas Winischhofer's patches for the kernel and xfree which should get 3D graphics out of my SiS video.

It will all be an academic exercise anyway, because I will hopefully get something new soon. Linux Format magazine will be running an article on building an up-to-date computer with Linux performance and compatibility the priority, and it's my birthday soon as well!
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Visseroth · Apprentice Joined: 13 Oct 2003 Posts: 291 Location: Idaho

hey let me know what kind of a system they recommend for Linux being as I would also like to build a new one when I can and to give you a nice idea, why not put the computer in a shelf or in a drawwer (don't know how to spell that) in your computer desk. That is what is going to be my next project.

Anyhow. Yea, let me know and I'm going to checkout that magazine myself

davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

Visseroth, I agree, you should look up Linux Format. They live at

www.linuxformat.co.uk

The web site isn't all that, but considering that the takeup of Linux seems to be poorer in UK than US or Europe, it seems that LXF sends its mags all over the world, because no-one else seems to have something similar.

You can get a CD or DVD edition (don't know about abroad) and there have been full distros of Mandrake, system rescue, mandrake move, plus loads of programs. One DVD had a Gentoo Live CD image plus a portage tree and loads of source files, so you could get a pretty good system up without an internet connection.

Well worth a year's subscription.

If I decide to build their ideal system and it works (it's one of several alternatives... it's a BIG birthday I'll be 50!) I'll definitely post here, including kernel settings etc.
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davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

I have now removed the nvidia card and set up XFree4.4.0 and gentoo-dev-sources-2.6.3r1 with Thomas Winischhofer's patches and it works fine until I try to run a program that uses OpenGL at which point the computer freezes, in exactly the same way as when I tried to run the nividia driver on kernels over 2.6.20. (Though I have to say, somewhat surprisingly, the 2D image quality is far better with the onboard SiS graphics than it was with either the nvidia driver or the nv driver when I had the nvidia card plugged in).

I am going to try once more with the vanilla 2.6.3 kernel and see what happens. Maybe the problem has been with the later kernels and my mobos agpgart driver...
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davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB

I've just seen in another thread talk of not including the "pre-emptible kernel" in the kernel build. I'll try that next...

As you can guess, the same thing happened with the vanilla kernel.
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HermanR · Posted: Mon Mar 29, 2004 7:38 pm Post subject:

Have you tried to disable AGP? Like:

davecs · Guru Joined: 08 Nov 2003 Posts: 436 Location: Dagenham, GB