nvidia-kernel problem on xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 (was o.k. on r3)

[joe_merchant]

Why, oh why did I "emerge --update world" ?

I bought a new system:
Nforce4 Ultra MB (Chaintech)
GeForce 6200 128MB PCIe (also Chaintech)
4GB DDR333 RAM (currently only getting 3.25GB due to BIOS masking, but that's a smaller problem for another day)
Athlon 64 3000+
Hitachi 250GB SATA drive
Some vanilla ATA DVD/CD-RW

In early February, I built a stage 3 Gentoo system off of a 2004.3 amd64 universal CD, the default kernel wouldn't recognize the SATA drive, but booting with the noapic option and doing:
modprobe sata_nv
modprobe forcedeth
got the system up to speed. I compiled a custom kernel (since genkernel default obviously wasn't quite ready for prime-time), and then did an:

emerge nvidia-glx

which handily also installed my xorg-x11 for me. I recompiled the kernel a few times to get rid of the Nvidia RIVA and other things, and then X started with almost no trouble at all. Whoever said Gentoo was hard to work with? I even put in the Doom3 demo, and it ran fine first try. I recompiled the kernel a bunch of times trying to get my last 0.75GB of RAM to be recognized (the BIOS has an option to remap it, which works for BIOS ramchecks, but causes the kernel to hang) - point being, I have a handful of kernel configs that all worked with the nvidia dri ver.

I used the system for about a month with no stability problems at all, but then I found a little game called lletters that I thought the kids would like. Well, it said it would install on amd64, but there was some problem or another during emerge, I posted a bugtrack on it and the guy that answered told me my system was "like, way way out of date, dude. You need to emerge --update world." I knew better, but one night the temptation was just too much, and I did it.

44 packages were upgraded, including xorg-x11, gcc, the kernel (still 2.6.9-r14, what's up with that?), and who knows what all else.

Then, after I rebooted, I the nvidia driver wouldn't load anymore. I emerge --unmerge 'ed it, and recompiled - no joy. I tried about a dozen kernel variations, still no joy, I tried to backdate my xorg-x11-6.8.0-r4 to r3, I'm not sure that really happened, portage didn't go and download r3 again, just used the sources on my hard drive - does it really keep all the old versions? Anyuway, when it was done, it thought it had given me -r3 back.

I've got the kernel to where it will load the nvidia driver now, but it doesn't do any good - the symptoms after startx are:

No Nvidia splash screen - just some garbage, sometimes with a checkerboard pattern - lately just black
Some graphics, like the wallpaper and clock, will appear, but no cursor, only one icon shows up, some scattered garbage (cursor?) in the middle of the screen.
I can exit with Ctrl-Alt-Backspace, but when my kernel used a "normal" console, the console display would be hosed until I rebooted.
Now, my latest kernel is using vga=791 and at least the console returns properly.

I thought about upgrading X to 6.8.2 just to see what happens, but there's a blocking package and I'm not too crazy about going forward further when I worked fine a month ago.

Is there a way to emerge --sync to an older date?

Any suggestions on what to try next?

Thanks,

P.S. Since I have no X on the new machine, I'm using the old machine (running MEPIS - no problems here, though I haven't tried any global updates lately..), thus, posting log or config files is a problem for me.

[thoughtform]

try adding nvidia-kernel and nvidia-glx to your /etc/portage/package.keywords file
like:
media-video/nvidia-kernel ~x86 x86
media-video/nvidia-glx ~x86 x86

that's for 'unstable' x86 version. not sure what the code is for AMD 64. It's probably similar.

[joe_merchant]

Thanks for the thought - I hadn't tried the unstable nvidia driver yet.

The keyword is ~amd64 amd64 and that got me the r3 nvidia kernel driver - no difference from the r1 stable version.