Kernel-2.6.7-1.494 and Nvidia Drivers

[Ernest L. Williams Jr.]

On Sunday 25 July 2004 03:45, Brian R Smith wrote:
> 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.  

What is the purpose of "PREEMPT_VOLUNTARY" ?

> 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.

Would be nice if we can get "preempt=on/off"  on the grub line, eh?


>
> 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.

Maybe, I should try the NVIDIA again. I have not been able to get NVIDIA 3D 
support going since the   "2.6.6-1.368" kernel, I think.




>
>
> -brian

-- 
Ernest L. Williams Jr.
SNS Control Systems Group
(865) 591-0183
ORNL