[Sheflug] NVidia drivers (was Re: VA Linux)

["wulfie" <nospam [at] wulfric7.co.uk>]

The SVGA server is a lowest common denominator driver for many cards and
doesn't use the hardware acceleration features of the TNT chipset. There is
a driver for both X3 & X4 on SuSE 7. However, Craig & myself used NVidia's
binary-only glx module for performance reasons - the X4 standard glx driver
is much slower.

 The X3 driver seems fine, with the drawback of the monolithic X lumbering
away. The X4 driver is a module inserted into the X4 server to utilise the
3d acceleration of the chipset. This is where the problems come in.

Both Craig & myself have had complete system lockup with a green bar across
the top of the screen. The kernel hangs so there is no network access. The
problem appears to be down to X trying to allocate DMA for the card and
failing. This is particularly common if Win95 has been running and the
system is warm booted into Linux. There is also an opposite effect on my
system that occaisionally after running X and rebooting the box Windows will
come up using the basic VGA driver, having totally lost track of the card's
resources. Moral - cold boot your box with an NVidia card installed....

It's much easier to edit XF86Config by hand and insert "Module = glx" and
"Driver =  NVidia" (I believe  they're the ones, syntax may be incorrect).
Doing this via SaX is no simpler.

Richard wrote :

> Meant to say that the SVGA driver worked with the NVIDIA cards that
> were served up on me at the last demo session.  It got to the point
> where I couldn't get any help with the cards so I did 'SaX' and hoped
> for the best.  As all of us were able to see.  They worked very well.
>
> Thanks
>
>
> Richard
>










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