Hello. I'm new around here, but have been lurking on the archives for some time now. I have been searching for an answer to this problem for about a week solid now, with no joy.
Almost every post I have read regarding system instability involving NVidia hardware points to either a) instability in the agp interface, or b) problems with the flavor-of-the-month nvidia driver. The frustrating thing is that I've tried both the "nv" and "nvidia" drivers and switching AGP modes (via the NvAGP XF86Config-4 option) between agpgart and the nvidia agp driver. The system freeze occurs with any combination of video card / agp drivers. I don't think it's a hardware problem, because I am writing this post from the affected machine on copy of Windows98 I happened to have laying around. I have also tweaked all of the available AGP related bios settings, and even removed all extraneous hardware from my machine, but still the problem remains :( I don't know if this helps, but may as well describe the crash itself. On an "init 5" in redhat 7.2, the system freezes almost instantly. I can sometimes type in a few characters of my login, and then I get pixel garbage and hard lockup. On mandrake 8.1 and 8.2 (BTW, I also tried the old 3.x.x version of X that mandrake can install) I can get further... I can login and work for about 4-5 minutes, sometimes longer if I'm lucky, and then same thing... pixel garbage and hard freeze. Using startx instead of changing init levels on either mandrake or redhat usually lets me work for slightly longer, but still crashes after an indeterminate amount of time. One last thing... this problem is just now manifesting itself after about a full year of total system stability. I was forced to reinstall the OS due to an unrelated disk problem. The OS is now installed on a completely different disk. The problem is that I can't remember exactly the version of X I used in my custom home-brew linux. This time, I'm going to take a snapshot of my drive the moment it becomes stable ;) I'm not sure what debugging output would be helpful here. It crashes hard before it can even dump core so a postmortem is going to be rough. The other prob is that I have no second machine that I can connect via a serial link to examine the system during the lockup. Please, please help! I am at my wits end, and I *really* need to get my *nix environment back to get back to work! I apologize in advance if this is the wrong forum, but I thought it appropriate considering that the problem persists on both the non-free NVidia driver and the plain old SVGA one. Thank you soooo much for your time. --dave __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! - Official partner of 2002 FIFA World Cup http://fifaworldcup.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
