[TriLUG] NVidia question

[crimsun at fungus.sh.nu]

On Sun, Jun 01, 2003 at 10:47:33PM +1400, Roy Vestal wrote:
> I have an Jaton NVidia GeForce2 MX-200 32MB card installed on an RHL 9.
> It's a 4x AGP card running in a 2x slot. When I run the NVidia driver, X
> sometimes gives a "hardware freeze". I put that in quotes, since the
> mouse still responds but no keyboard including the NumLock. I have to
> power off or reset in order to restart. Without the driver X works fine.
> I'm running Gnome on this box. 

As a nitpick, X is actually "spinning" (not locked) according to an
Nvidia employee. In this particular instance, if you have alt+sysrq
support compiled into your kernel (under the kernel hacking option in
*config), you can kill X (alt+sysrq+k) and restart it. I agree that
this is a suboptimal technique, however. To troubleshoot, you'll need
to tell some hardware and /proc settings, mainly:

$ /sbin/lspci -v|more
(look for the Host bridge:  and PCI bridge:)

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/host-bridge

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/agp/status
(this you need to run from within X)

$ cat /proc/version

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version

$ cc -v

Also, the steps you took/take to reproduce the spinning are helpful,
though I know from first-hand experience that randomness seems to be a
factor as well.

Check #nvidia on irc.trilug.org for more assistance.

-- 
Dan Chen                crimsun at fungus.sh.nu
GPG key: www.unc.edu/~crimsun/pubkey.gpg.asc