NVIDIA Driver and xdm
May 26th, 2001 by CrusaderBernhard Kuhn sent in some newadvice forNVIDIAdriverusers which amounts avoiding the use of xdm to start yourXFree86 session. If you don’t start X with startx and have been experiencing stability problems, be sure to give this a read.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I must be one of the lucky ones… I have never had a problem with it hanging or aborting during a game… I did have a problem initally installing the drivers, but I think that is because I am very new to linux………
I would LOVE to know how to work LM_Sensors though :-)….
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I’ve run with AGP disabled on my AMD 750 chipset with increasing stability over the last few NVIDIA releases. Disabling USB has also improved the time between failures – for some reason using a USB joystick alongside the NVIDIA drivers would result in a lockup sooner or later. This xdm hint is interesting though – I wonder if there are options to increase the time between X restarts in xdm and whether similar problems are seen with gdm (which I use)?
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
“Maybe there is a race condition in the driver code that doesn’t show up at some magic NVclock/FSB frequency ratios?”
Well, if the source was available these problems could be tested, debugged, and fixed. It’s amazing how many times I have thought that. I have a geforce 2 gts, and have had problems time and again with these drivers. Most are fixed now, but I think I will be getting an ati card my next purchase if the drivers for it are mature enough.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I just upgraded to a Geforce2 400 MX. I run it with NvAGP set to 1 and the 1.0-1251 drivers. Mandrake 8.0.
[br]
KDM causes no end of headaches. I could not get 3D games to work hardly at all. This was also true when I had my voodoo 3k installed. GDM is better but there were still some problems. XDM works for the most part. However when I start a 3D game and it segfaults (signal 11), I have found that exiting to xdm and doing a CTRL+ALT+Backspace to do a video hardware reset is the only way to get rid of the problem. The sigsegv usually seems to happen after I have been logged in for a while.
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For some reason my startx does not work. It runs the X-server but I never get my window manager.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
What do you know it is this damn KDM thing!
I had Mandrake 8.0 and driver v0.9-769. I got 3 hard crashes and 2 X crashes in a week. I compiled from source just to be sure. Still more crashes. I went to RedHat 7.1, and at the end of a week I had only one X crash. Happy about the improved stability, I decided to upgrade the driver. With v1.0-1251 I couldn’t run Quake3 anymore. I got a black screen…wait…wait…Sig11, then back to the desktop.
I just read this advice and wasn’t optimistic it would help. All this time with v0.9-5, v0.96-769 on Mandrake 7.2 and 8.0 and RedHat 7.1 I’ve been using KDM and Quake3 worked. It was the v1.0 driver that had problems with KDM. I go to runlevel 3 and startx, and wahlah! Quake3 works.
BTW, I run a dual Celery Abit BP6 system with Creative’s GeForce2 GTS, and a SBLive. In my experience RH has better SMP kernels than anybody else (probably their enterprise focus), that is why I switched from Mdk8.0 . Plus Mdk8.0 had hideous fonts and I got frustrated trying to get rid of them (abiword fonts, and TTF Arial suck).
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I used to run Slackware 7.1, until two months or so ago, when I upgraded to the current tree, and with both versions, I’ve never had a single problem with any of the NVIDIA drivers, excluding of course until recently the lack of extensions needed for OpenGL programing, specifically for GPU effects and what not. So, my advice to all of you is to drop Redhat, Mandrake, Suse, and Caldera, go to http://ftp.slackware.com and download the ISO. Slackware is so much better, words can’t describe it.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I actually recommend to shutdown X if you have DDR enabled card. Here is my experience:
If I leave my machine 1280×1024 @ 85hz then when I come to play quake after day or two, I get almost immediate crash.
However if I shutdown X into text mode and comeback to play quake and such other things, I usually do so for longer periods of time. I also notice that clean boot, will drastically drop possibility of hardfreezing your own machine as well. So if you want to play quake reboot your box and you’re fine for good round of quakeIII.
Good luck 1337 dudes,
perlpimp.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I was wondering if anyone could give me a pointer with the new 1.0-1251 drivers? I cannot seem to get the nvidia agp drivear to work. Compiling it into the kernel works, but when I take it out, cat /proc/nv/card0 it shows agp as disabled. I have tried forcing it in X11 config file and it just doesn’t work.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I’m using gdm, Athlon (C) 1.2Ghz on an Asus A7V133, 512M SDRAM, GeForce2 GTS, FSB is at 133Mhz, 400W power supply, Debian unstable/sid, with the 1.0-1251 nvidia driver, and everything is very smooth and rock solid… I’ve never had a problem with X since installing the driver.
Hm?
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
The problem was most obvious with kdm.
Now I use gpm, which gives less problems with the nvidia drivers.
November 30th, -0001 at 12:00 am
I’ve got a TNT2 utra running atop an asus A7V133/256Mb of ram and 900MHz cpu.
In windows I get around 105fps in quake3 (tweaked/demo127.dm_48) while in linux, with *exactly* the same config and color depth (16bits) i get 84fps, i.e. around 80% less.
Questions:
1. Is this difference TNT2U specific?
2. How can I increase Q3 performance in linux?
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