X lock / crash + slowdowns - fc2

[T. 'Nifty New Hat' Mitchell]

On Mon, Jun 21, 2004 at 01:48:58PM +0100, D. D. Brierton wrote:
> On Mon, 2004-06-21 at 13:39, dballester at kernpharma.com wrote:
> > Hi:
> > 
> > >What graphics card are you using? Which drivers? (Have you installed
> > >Nvidia or ATi proprietary stuff?)
> > 
> > May be Nvidia? Same problems with a Dell D800 with Nvidia GForce4. We are
> > usin 4k kernel stack, but when any 3D Hardware accel is used ( glxgears or
> > sceensavers, for example ) all X crash.
> 
> Well I don't know if this is any help or not, but I have had no problems
> whatsoever using FC2, x.org, kernel-2.6.6-1.435.i686 from Fedora Updates
> (4K stack), and the nv driver on a Dell Inspiron 8200 with NVidia
> GeForce 440 Go. glxgears and xscreensaver all work fine (albeit, very
> very slowly).

I had to do none of this stuff myself but these ideas could help.

If you have the luxury of a clean install do the minimum of config for
X until after doing a full system update with up2date or yum.

Open source OpenGL depends on Mesa libs.  The nVidia closed source
driver and library package requests that these be removed and in some
cases replaces them.  Ensure that Mesa libs are current.  You can
inspect libraries based on the hints below or just tidy up. Thus:

  rpm -e XFree86-Mesa-libGLU
  rpm -e XFree86-Mesa-libGL
  up2date install  XFree86-Mesa-libGLU XFree86-Mesa-libGL

If you do the three things above the next may prove to be a wild goose
chase.....

One area of caution may be cleaning up nVidia driver and library bits
when falling back to the open source driver.  The nvidia release notes
tell me: 

     "Installation will also install the utility `nvidia-installer`,
     which may be later used to uninstall drivers, auto-download
     updated drivers, etc."

i.e. Look with care at the removal options of the nvidia installer and
at the installer itself.  You should do the remove then reinstall the
various graphic libraries at initstate 3.

An additional caution is that the nvidia process has no SELinux knowledge!
It is possible that folks with SELinux installed and in enforcing mode
will have more to untangle than others.  I would run the nVidia installer
with enforcing turned off for installation (future or 8k patched) or 
in removal mode.

One interesting thing about xorg package is that with no
/etc/X11/*config file my X-windows came up for me with a set of rather
nice set of defaults for my GeForce2 MX/MX 400 card.  I had expected
to be tossed into a config tool but was rewarded with a working X
server.  

I see you are running kernel-2.6.6-1.435... do the up2date thing.
No point in chasing things if it is fixed in current code.

Do inspect the log files in /var/log the old X86Free log and the new
xorg file will both be there for those that update FC1 - FC2 this is
confusing.  Check your dates so you are inspecting the correct log
file.  

If you have the luxury of a clean install make the minimum of config
changes for X until after doing a full system update with up2date or
yum.

This is from the nvidia readme....  Note the uninstall hint at the end.

    The .run file is a self-extracting archive.  When the .run file is
    executed, it extracts the contents of the archive, and runs the contained
    `nvidia-installer` utility, which will walk you through installation of
    the NVIDIA driver.

    The .run file accepts many commandline options.  Here are a few of the
    more common options:

	--info
	    Print embedded info about the .run file and exit.

	--check
	    Check integrity of the archive and exit.

	--extract-only
	    Extract the contents of ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336.run,
	    but do not run 'nvidia-installer'.

	--help
	    Print usage information for the common commandline options
	    and exit.


	--advanced-options
	    Print usage information for the common commandline options as
	    well as the advanced options, and then exit.

    Installation will also install the utility `nvidia-installer`, which may
    be later used to uninstall drivers, auto-download updated drivers, etc.
                                                                                
A final caution... there is a new enough kernel that you might have a
version reversal if you try one of the 8K patched kernels.  Stay
current.... and use no special rpm flags to install a patched kernel.


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