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

[Will Newton <nospam [at] misconception.org.uk>]

On Wed, 31 Jan 2001, wulfie wrote:

> 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.

That's because the X standard glx is software. nVidia have not released
specs for any of their recent boards. The SVGA driver runs them as little
more than a VESA card.

> 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....

I hope people listen to this, I really do. Buy an nVidia card, and you too
could have a life like this. The amount of people posting to dri-devel
having problems with nVidia cards - the only answer is "sorry, we can't do
anything about it. Ask nVidia.".

Good luck getting it fixed, but you should buy these things with your eyes
open, nVidia drivers are not stable unless you have the "magic
configuration". They even have their own AGPGART drivers! If anyone is
looking to buy a new gfx card, take heed, there is very little you can do
to fix these problems.


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