Biostar NF4UL-A9 XGP Slot not working...

xitrium · n00b Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 16

I have the NF4UL-A9 with the XGP slot and I cannot get Linux to correctly set up AGP on it... Game performance is generally worse than in Windows, and there are a few other reasons I think something might be broken:
1) /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/host-bridge is empty
2) /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status is empty
3) xitrium@hal ~ $ dmesg | grep AGP
No AGP bridge found

Has anyone out there used this board? I have had no luck trying to find anyone else with this issue in Linux on google...

Thanks

widan · Posted: Fri Mar 09, 2007 10:31 am Post subject:

That's because it's not AGP. The nForce4 can't handle AGP at all, so they connected the AGP port to the PCI bus. It's possible because AGP 1x was essentially a dedicated 66-MHz PCI port with extensions allowing the card to read from system RAM with address remapping through the GART. At least some AGP cards can run on such a "PCI with AGP connector" port (compatibility isn't that great apparently, nor is performance).

But you won't have an AGP bridge nor GART, since your port is not "real" AGP, so it's normal the drivers don't detect AGP settings. I don't know why the performance would be much worse than in Windows though.

xitrium · n00b Joined: 26 Feb 2004 Posts: 16

Thanks for your response!
I know it isn't true AGP, but in Windows I'm pretty sure I was able to get it to function as an AGP slot with the nvidia nforce4 AMD drivers... At least, when I had them installed, games would play just fine, and then when I accidentally removed them, I noticed a severe performance drop, similar to what I get in Linux now. Reinstalling the drivers in Windows fixed it, but I'm pretty sure I have all the drivers selected that I need... Just in case, my kernel config is here: http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~smt6k/config.gz. I'm pretty much out of ideas, so any help or hints are really appreciated.

Thanks again