Hello everybody,
Some of you will remember me from such shows as "Dave and the TNT2 go head to dual-head", and "When Good Video Cards Go Bad, Roman Numeral 3! (hosted by Sheriff John Burnell)". Let me bring you my latest thrilling installment in the ongoing saga... First of all I thought I had a problem with dual head. I purchased a GeForce2 Pro AGP video card and a TNT2 M64 PCI video card, in the hope of getting them working in a dual head configuration. I have had almost complete success except for one VERY annoying problem... With the NVIDIA drivers (not the X nv driver), and in fact every single version of them that I've tried in the last 6 months, I have had this same problem. I can lock up XFree86 really really well simply by enabling opaque window moving and dragging an xterm around a bit. After a few seconds, random coloured rectangles appear randomly and then BANG, XFree86 process hits 99% and sits there, forever. Remote ssh and kill -9 brings it all down again and I can restart it with 'xinit' (albeit from the remote session - the virtual console is "out of frequency range" for some reason after this). Doesn't matter on the window manager - I've tried fluxbox, openbox, blackbox, pwm, sawfish... So, I disable opaque window moving and I can live in peace for perhaps a day at a time... But, there are further problems - running a browser like mozilla or konqueror on the tnt2 head causes a lockup now and again when scrolling. Emacs can cause the lockup at seemingly random times (like when I unminimised it today and it tried to redraw itself). Once upon a time I did an strace on it and discovered that the X server was locked up in some sort of timer interrupt loop... nobody could help me there. A few observations: 1. The screen corruption ONLY EVER occurs on the TNT2 card. 2. I went out and bought a brand new TNT2 M64 card, and the exact same thing happens (in fact more frequently). 3. Both TNT2 cards work perfectly on another computer (XP1600+) 4. Both TNT2 cards work flawlessly in Windows 2000 5. Both TNT2 cards work flawlessly with the XFree86 'nv' driver (but no 3d accel. of course). 6. *** BOTH TNT2 cards work appallingly when they are the ONLY card installed in the system and I try and use the NVIDIA driver in X. Not only do I get all the problems I had before with the dual head setup, but they are about 10x worse (more frequent, funkier corruption) without the GeForce2 installed and active *** 7. Occasionally, maybe 1 time in 4, the lockup is a total system freeze. Can't even ping the box. It's dead. I've tried running the X debug server in a hope to attach gdb to it but it refuses to load the nvidia driver because it's statically built. How do I get around this? It will only start with the 'nv' driver and that one works fine anyway. So what is going on here? I've tried different installations of linux (debian sid), many different NVIDIA driver versions, nv & utahglx (works fine once I got it working in X4.2), each TNT2 card on it's own (nasty), dual head (not so nasty but a lockup a day on average). I'm just about ready to throw the entire system away and start again, this time with ATI cards or even Matrox, but I can't be sure it's a hardware problem! The cards both work fine on their own or with the GeForce2 when using the 'nv' driver but absolutely appallingly with the NVIDIA driver. I've contacted nvidia several times and got nothing out of them. I've tried every nvidia forum I can fin [Well, what do you know? It just locked up then too! And all I was doing was typing the word 'find'. I got as far as the 'n' when my solid white cursor only drew half of itself. Thank goodness for 'screen'] d and every website I can find. I am at a complete loss as to where to go now with this. Can someone *please* spend a little time with me over email thinking this through and working towards a solution? It all points at the nvidia driver really doesn't it??? There must be someone out there who knows enough about it and is willing to think a little about it. I would be eternally greatful (well, for a few weeks anyway :) I'm willing to run debuggers on it constantly if need be, but I don't know where to start. I don't believe it - it just locked up again when I was deleting a chunk of text in this email with line-cut (ctrl-K). It seems intensive screen redraws cause the problem, like scrolling, maximising, minimising, etc. Hardware: AMD Athlon 1.2 Thunderbird 256 megs SDRAM GeForce2 Pro 64MB AGP (Gigabyte) TNT2 M64 (Pine) and TNT2 M64 (Auriga), both 32MB PCI Some other stuff but the problem occurs without ANY extra peripherals or cards attached. Linux kernel 2.4.19 (have had problem with 2.4.18, 2.4.17, 2.4.16...) XFree86 4.2.1 (also had problem with 4.2.0 and 4.1.x) I can post my XF86Config-4 file if anyone wants it, but I know what I'm doing there I think (except with the nvidia driver options perhaps). Thanks, David Antliff [EMAIL PROTECTED] Design Engineer Med-Dev Ltd. tel. +64-4-972-7661 Wellington, New Zealand www.med-dev.co.nz _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
