Nvidia driver

Roger Heflin rogerheflin at gmail.com
Tue Aug 26 14:52:21 UTC 2008


Claude Jones wrote:
> On Tue August 26 2008 9:20:00 am Per Anton Rønning wrote:
>> rpm -qa | grep kernel returns this:
>> kernel-PAE-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686
>> kernel-headers-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i386
>> kerneloops-0.11-1.fc9.i386
>> kernel-PAE-2.6.25.11-97.fc9.i686
>> kernel-2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686
>>
>> And this seems to be the same as the last result.
>>
>> My machine has 4 GiB ram installed,  of which 3.7 GiB is effective.
>>
>> uname -a gives:
>>
>> Linux localhost.localdomain 2.6.25.14-108.fc9.i686.PAE #1 SMP Mon Aug 4
>> 13:57:11 EDT 2008 i686 i686 i386 GNU/Linux
>>
>> I sent a posting about some progress in the matter (my last one) - but I
>> still seem to miss something (ref posting)
> 
> well, one thing that's wrong is that you're running the PAE kernel with less 
> than 4 GB of memory...I don't think that has anything to do with your nvidia 
> problem, but, if it were me, I'd remove the PAE kernel - it has no business 
> being even installed on your machine

Don't count on that, the 4GB thing is a very very rough and often wrong *SIMPLE* 
rule.

Just because a machine has under 4GB of ram does not mean that the PAE kernel 
won't give you more memory.    The bios *CAN* (some do, some don't) remap 
something that is covered by a video card, or otherwise reserved for something 
to above 4GB requiring a PAE kernel to use it.   And this can start happening at 
around 3GB of ram or more, the only way to know if PAE is correct for a given 
setup is to either know exactly what the bios is doing or to test it.

It all depends on exactly what the bios is doing, he would need to boot a PAE 
and a non-PAE kernel and check how much memory is being seen by each, if they 
are the same or really close (within 100MB) I would avoid the PAE kernel.

                           Roger




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