nforce3

[James Wilkinson]

Endy wrote:
> I've got an nforce3 250 on a gigabyte ga-k8ns motherboard with an amd64 
> 3000+.  Been having crashing issues for awhile and there is still no 
> apparent reason for it.  I was wondering if maybe the chipset just 
> doesn't have very good support yet, so does anyone know about nforce3 
> support?

What sort of graphics card? And what do you mean by "crash"? Do you get
any error messages, or does the machine just freeze?

Do you have proprietary drivers (such as Nvidia or ATi) installed?

Are you running in 64 bit mode or 32 bit mode? (What's the output of
"uname -a"?)

My experience (with an nForce 4 board and an Athlon 64 3200+, running in
64 bit mode) is that the machine is fine out of X, and can be made
stable in X.

But using a PCI Radeon 9250 graphics card leads to freezing when in X
either with FC3 as delivered, or with all updates applied.

I'd like to state here that your problem might well be different to
the one I've been experiencing. If you've installed binary drivers, I'd
suspect them. I'm not necessarily suggesting you follow them.

But if you want to do some experimentation, then here are a few pointers
to what I've found out. The notes below apply to Radeon 92x0 and below.
They may apply to certain other graphics with Fedora provided drivers.

I *think* I've nailed my instability down to the DRM/DRI code. At any
rate it's stable once I switched to the ati driver and started running a
custom-compiled kernel without the "radeon" DRI module compiled in.

This gives me 2D accelerated X (which is what I want), but no 3D
acceleration.

I suspect that one could turn off the radeon module with a line like
install radeon /bin/true
in /etc/modprobe.conf (and keep running official Fedora kernels). Use
lspci to see if the radeon module is loaded.

Just doing this, without changing the driver (to ati) in
/etc/X11/xorg.conf, will leave you without a working X. If you're not
happy with editing these files in a terminal editor, leave them alone.

Next time I get a chance to experiment, I want to try the radeon X
driver with the "Load: dri" line in /etc/X11/x.org commented out.

Hope this helps someone,

James.

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