NVidia - Kernel - X.org Troubleshooting - Please Help.

riverty · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 22

Blixel,

I can confirm to you that the problem is not FX 5200 series GPU's. Like you, I keep up on quite a few forums about this problem and my sense is that it's something new in OpenGL and/or kernel and/or X (not KDE/Gnome). A memory leak, PCI routing, I dunno. This is programmer stuff that which I am not versed in. Whatever it is, the kernel seems to be unaware that the display sub-system is locked in a goofy, mouse-only state. I mean, mp3's still play, mouse still moves but keyboard 'num-lock' light is stuck. I don't have a second machine but I read people are able to SSH in and safely shutdown their boxes.

I have read about the very same problem from people with mobo's and chipsets from ASUS, Intel, VIA, MSI, and more. Also, differing video cards and GPU's all from the NVidia line of course.

Anyway, still waiting for "The Fix!"

riverty · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 22

BTW everyone. As of right now, this thread has been viewed 2272 times! I'm thinking this just might mean that a lot of people are searching for answers to this problem.

Just a thought...

blixel · Posted: Thu Oct 21, 2004 11:20 pm Post subject:

KeithReuters · Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 6:07 am Post subject:

System now has been up for over a day without a crash, I activated the composite extension, all acceleration options, and I'm using settrans and xcompmgr for shadows and transparent windows. Without a glitch. I however had to downclock my memory from 405 mhz to 390 mhz with nvclock. Will let you guys know -- but remember that before using the drivers from nvidia.com, my system would not stay up for more than 5 minutes!!

Also, what version gcc do you use?

- P

riverty · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 22

I'm using GCC 3.3.4 (r1).

KeithReuters · Posted: Fri Oct 22, 2004 11:10 pm Post subject:

3.3.3-r6 here. Do you think there might be a link?

Still up. It's been 48 hours. I compiled ximian evolution and open office, and a whole bunch of stuff all night and all day, with an opengl screensaver running at the same time.

- P

mb10 · n00b Joined: 28 Nov 2002 Posts: 8

I've not been experiencing the same problems as what you guys have been -- but that isn't to say that I haven't seen a lock up. I have within the last week... but I've been recompiling my kernel so much that i haven't had much uptime to talk about (maybe 2 or 3 days).

Anyways, I found this page:
http://atlas.et.tudelft.nl/verwei90/nforce2/intro.html
http://atlas.et.tudelft.nl/verwei90/nforce2/solution.html
through google.

It seems to address your problems.

Hope it helps.

Now, if someone would like to help me from getting irregular segfaults during compilation, i'd appreciate it

--mb[/url]
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KeithReuters · Posted: Sat Oct 23, 2004 4:52 am Post subject:

Thanks but that addresses a totally different problem, which is the unstability of systems based on nforce2 chipsets.

- P

KeithReuters · Posted: Sun Oct 24, 2004 6:50 am Post subject:

First crash after 4 days up. Had to SSH from my laptop to reboot as the magic keys didn't even work.

- P

riverty · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 22

2 comments:

First, what is up with the amount of time in between crashes? I have logged 18+ hours and then locked. Mostly though, it's just a matter of minutes. I do not understand what would happen at kernel / video level "whenever it wants to?" We "should" be able to reproduce the lock-ups on demand but it's not the case here.

Second, I have also compiled my kernel with MagicKeys. Hopefully, I will be able to get this machine to lock and give me some output as to why. Will see...

bluesea · n00b Joined: 10 May 2004 Posts: 27

Another data point:

KeithReuters · Posted: Fri Oct 29, 2004 4:06 am Post subject:

I guess we're lucky still, I added a Radeon to my setup for my second LCD, and it's a nightmare. Machine locks up all the time.

- P

Metraxis · n00b Joined: 19 Oct 2004 Posts: 16

No solution yet from me, though I would like to adjust my earlier statement. The 3d application does not have to be running full screen when it closes to cause the panic. On a related note, when rebooting after a panic, where do you loo for any logging that might have occured?

Clapper · Apprentice Joined: 29 Sep 2003 Posts: 177

So, what video card can I buy that is rock solid stable?
Not much use in running linux with this many crashes- XP is much more stable for me, sad to say. The only thing preventing me from "going back" is my pride...

bluesea · n00b Joined: 10 May 2004 Posts: 27

That's the same question I asked in these forums a month or two ago... and everyone said to go with nVidia

...

My old Matrox G400 (32MB) was rock solid stable. But I wanted to upgrade to more memory and TV-out (and an excuse to buy something new

). Had I known then what I know now, I would have skipped the whole process and spent $50 on a video cable with VGA-in, VGA-out, and TV-out. Since, with the 5700, I haven't gotten tv-out to work, and I can't use gl-graphics, I would have been ahead in $$ and functionality.
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erutangiS

suso · Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 9:01 pm Post subject:

Some much needed comic relief...

[parody]

Hey guys, I think I figured it ALL out. Apparently Nvidia (and supposively supported by Microsoft)
put some extra code into their drivers a while back around the 4496 series and
wasn't triggered until now. I was able to hack into nvidia's server last night
and grab the source code for the nvidia drivers, check out this part in one of
the include files:

KeithReuters · Posted: Tue Nov 09, 2004 9:08 pm Post subject:

haha. Mine finally started crashing again every two days. Also, sometimes the display will get corrupted and will get a bunch of horizontal white lines that make text unreadable. I have a dual setup with an ATI, and when I move an unreadable window to the second display (the ATI one) then it becomes readable.

this is soooooo frustrating.

- Pascal.

FNX · n00b Joined: 03 Nov 2004 Posts: 40 Location: Istanbul

Hi guys,
I'm experiencing the same with my FX 5200 AGP 128 Mb, and am used getting frustrated, lost a lot of drawing work and time of course because of this card, driver, cpu ... whatever causes this frozen Xbubble.

I haven't met any error messages throughout this thread, or missed, and sending one.

This is what i got in the ssytem messages after a X lock, wish it helps searching for the medicine:

NVRM: Xid: 6, PE0000 1ffc ffffffff 0000fce0 ffffffff ffffffff

Can overheat of the card be the cause?

I have newly updated (10 min ago) all over the system and waiting for a crash...
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Fnx

riverty · n00b Joined: 23 Sep 2004 Posts: 22

I would doubt that heat is the problem here but there is a possibility. My "problem card" runs fine, gaming for hours in Windows with no heat problems. I broke down and replaced my card with a GeForce FX 5700LE (AGP) and everything seems fine now. Same driver, same system build, all good. I still do not have an answer to this problem, sorry.

suso · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 5:12 am Post subject:

You know, I kinda wondered about the heat problem too. Mainly because I noticed that the fan on the card wasn't even running while I was playing a 3d game. But there is nowhere to plug the fan in. Anyways, probably not, but still.
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llsardonicll · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2004 Posts: 110

On the wife's machine, when using the nvidia module, X would freeze anywhere from 1-5 minutes. Didn't matter what wm was running, and glx apps would run great if I coudl get them running before it crashed, but it would always crash within 5 minutes. I had tried everything, and nothing.
Finally, I did an emerge unmerge sysvinit && ACCEPT_KEYWORDS="~x86" emerge baselayout ... reboot and now it's 7 days later and she's been folding non-stop, compiling and running a glx screensaver and hasn't had a single hiccup.

suso · Posted: Thu Nov 11, 2004 8:14 pm Post subject:

Well, I just tried the above, then rebooted and within minutes it froze. Did you recompile anything else after doing this? What do you mean by "folding"?
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llsardonicll · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 07 Oct 2004 Posts: 110

oh folding@home, distributed computing.... i didn't recompile anything...just did the above... her computer runs the latest gentoo-dev-sources, stock genkernel config, latest stable xorg with the stock config created with the xorg-config with the only diffrences is the nvidia driver instead of nv, dri commented out, and option "NvAgp" "0" in the nvidia device section.... i had to change the permissions on the devices it created, but X was stable and not freezing at that point

RobDin

Hi,

I have the same problems ( this is the second time since I begun using Gentoo ). I'm running on:

Intell Pentium IV 3200 MHz FSB 800
1024 MB DDR 400
Geforce FX 5600

The first time I had this problem, about half a year ago, I eventually fixed it by finding the right combination of settings in the Xorg.conf file(#option NvAGP 1) and the right Nvidia driver version. But I have recently(2 days ago) upgraded to a new driver version(from 6111 to 6111-r3) and ever since that upgrade I trying to get the whole combination to work again.

I think that it's a stupid fault/mistake(or on purpose

) of a lazy nvidia driver 4linux programmer. I have 2 reasons for that, one is that in the period that everything was working fine, I could do anything with that system, as long as I didn't change anything that has to do with nvidia driver. And the second is that allmost 80% to 90% of the people are using Nvidia cards. Although I have seen posts that ATI users have similar problems( but most of those problems do not have certain details that the Nvidia group do have(like: X crashes, only mouse in X, background processes still work(ssh, ftp and stuff like that) ) ). I believe that in the case of the Nvidia drivers it is a mistake too difficult to be found by anyone( that does not have access to the nvidia source code, and is willing to spend the next couple of weeks trying to read the code ).

The first time I had this problem I allready thought that there was no real solid solution, unless Nvidia had found a "serious bug" that was found to have been there since version 4xxx/5xxx (I will not be surprised if Nvidia sends out such a message in the near future). For now I'm going on a quest to search for a sollution to start my system again, without it crashing.

Good luck for those on this Forum that have allready been searching too long
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RobDin

Save the whales, collect the whole set

« Zo niet, Dan toch »

virtual · Posted: Sat Nov 20, 2004 4:56 pm Post subject:

Hi,

I just have to reply with my experience, I had a Nvidia 5600 FX card and started to play Doom3 and sometimes the screen would go black for a second or for a couple of seconds and then I would continue playing and the error would pop up at random intervals.

I reconfigured the kernel, used nitro sources and played around with xorg.conf and fast writes on and off, I also tried the new 6629 driver. After all this the problem decreased or grew larger but it never went away completly.

Then I swapped my 5600 FX card with a Nvidia Geforce 4200 MMX FX card (sorry if the name is not totaly right) and now the problems realy started X would freeze, the problem with Doom3 escalated, I went through the sam ritual with kernels and xorg.conf but now the problem was worse when I changed from 6111 to the 6629 driver I realy had problems.

Enter the solution from a non working (wierd) system:
1) Take out the Nvidia card
2) Replaced card with a new Nvidia 5700LE

ZAP everything works no freezing, no black screens, kernels that work ( i have working )
nitro3, nitro4, gentoo-2.6.9-r4.
Fast-writes work, xorg.conf OK, to make a long and boring story short

Not pickky on what kernel is used
Not pickky on xorg.conf (it was always right)
Not pickky on fast-writes (works on and off)
Not picky on driver 6111 or 6629, both work 6629 is faster though

Now I did not notice any hardware error on my video cards but I belive when they were put under preassure a harware error reviled itself in strange ways.
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