Kernel-2.6.7-1.494 and Nvidia Drivers

[Brian R Smith]

Hi,

Regarding Kernel-2.6.7-1.494 and Nvidia Drivers,

I don't know if this has been mentioned before, but I've noticed some
nasty problems with this kernel release (the rpm) and the Nvidia drivers
while running Quake3 based games.  

First of all, performance is terrible.  I could barely get Return to
Castle Wolfenstein to run acceptably at 800x600x32 despite the fact that
normally, it runs flawlessly on my Geforce2go at 1024x768x32 under
normal circumstances.  Secondly, it seems that some of the hardware
lighting instructions break under this kernel.

After fooling around with some things to try to fix this problem, I
noticed that the kacpid process crashes for some reason, causing it to
race and use >50% cpu.

I did some looking around and noticed that some people have had issues
with the PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY patch that was applied to this kernel and had
a hunch that perhaps this patch was in some way screwing up the ACPI
subsystem in the kernel.  Rather than follow the same old mantra of
adding an acpi=off line to grub (especially since this machine is a
laptop), I rebuilt the kernel _without_ PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY and with
PREEMPT and voila, the problems disappeared.  kacpid stopped crashing
and 3d under q3 based games worked wonderfully with no apparent
performance hit to my setup.

I hope that if anyone else runs across this problem that this will help
them and that perhaps it could help lead to a bug fix for this.


-brian