Last week I upgraded the kernel on one of my 5 year old Pentium 4 desktop machines to 2.6.24-gentoo-r3. Kernel compilation went fine as usual but when I tried to emerge the current (x86) binary nVidia driver [96.43.01] for its GeForce4 MX 440 AGP 8x graphics card it failed with an error message that the it couldn't determine the kernel version.
The graphics card is around 5-7 years old and won't run on later 1xx.xx.xx versions of the binary blob, so I'd masked the driver to: /etc/portage/package.mask/nvidia-drivers >=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-97.00.00 ============================== The driver worked fine on the previous kernel 2.6.23-gentoo-r9. The solution was to do what I've always done for binary blobs (nvidia,ati,madwifi-ng etc) and add: /etc/portage/package.keywords x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers ~86 ============================== This allowed me to go from 96.43.01 to 96.43.05. Unfortunately, even though the driver compiled fine and started without error this driver proved to be unstable on my machine and graphics hardware. X (1.3.0-r5) failed on KDE logout with: /etc/var/log/Xorg.0.log: Backtrace: 0: /usr/bin/X(xf86SigHandler+0x85) [0x80c7c57] 1: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//nvidia_drv.so(_nv001216X+0xe5) [0xb71d6711] 2: [0x1] Fatal server error: Caught signal 11. Server aborting =============================== Maybe running the uvesafb framebuffer and fbcondecor (livecd-2007.0 theme) has something to do with the sigsegv problems on just this particular driver version but I knew that I couldn't run this driver. I did a bit of research and found an ugly hack to get the 96.43.01 driver working on kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3 so I changed the mask to: /etc/portage/package.mask/nvidia-drivers >x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-96.43.01 ========================================= I then worked the dark magic: # ln -s /usr/src/linux/include/asm-x86 /usr/src/linux/include/asm-i386 (/usr/src/linux points to the new kernel 2.6.24-gentoo-r3) ========================================== I reemerged nvidia-drivers and the hack worked. I got the reliable 96.43.01 driver working again, though with some concerns about future reliability. There might be other changes within the kernel 2.6.24 that driver 96.43.01 doesn't know about that could cause me some grief in the future, but for now it works fine. Now a week later I find that portage has released the nvidia binary driver 96.43.05 as stable on x86. I allowed it to emerge, but it still had the X killing problem when logging out of KDE. Some of the things I've read suggest nvidia have been informed of this specific problem but I was wondering if there's any more information around about this issue? I know the card is getting old and perhaps I should use the open nv driver, but the card usually works really well with the binary blob. I would also like to know if these problems were known to the Gentoo devs when they released 96.43.05 as stable on x86. -- Regards, Gregory. -- gentoo-user@lists.gentoo.org mailing list
