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  From: Martin Sandiford <ms@mcdev.com.au>
  To  : David Lloyd <lloy0076@rebel.net.au>
  Date: 10 Jan 2001 18:34:16 +1030

Re: 2.2.18 / nVidia Driver Weirdness

On Wed, 10 Jan 2001, lloy0076@rebel.net.au wrote:
> Hmmm...
> 
> I've decided that my recently downloaded, official nVidia drivers (for
> a Riva TNT2 Ultra) are causing my system to become less stable than it
> normally is. I suspect that it's speaking very closely to the kernel
> itself to the extent where a driver compiled against 2.2.17 won't work
> with Kernel 2.2.18 without a rebuild...

If you run /sbin/lsmod you will see an NVdriver module loaded.  This
provides card services through /dev/nvidia*

> In and of itself I don't this is particularly unusual, except there's
> some closed source OpenGLX drivers that I simply can't build and every
> now and then my system goes bust but only when I'm running X...

Yes, the closed source nVidia drivers seem to be of quite poor quality.
My development machine has gone from being rebooted every 3 months or so
(usually due to poorly executed kernel frobbing), to needing a reboot
every 2-3 days after locking absolutely solid.  It was even worse than
this until I discovered a few things that seem to have a high
probability of failure:

1. If you use xdm, and try to log out after an X session, it appears
that the restart of the X server that this causes will sometimes lock my
system solid.  I presume this will be the same with gdm and kdm.  This
means that I don't log out now.

2. Recent xlockmores with OpenGL screensavers seem to occasionally crash
the server also.

3. Random crashes when running OpenGL programs, especially those that
exit unexpectedly :)

I am not terribly impressed with the way that nVidia has approached the
issue of providing 3D/GLX drivers for Linux, although perhaps they do
deserve some kudos for doing this at all.  Unfortunately, it has been
some 4 months since the last release.  I guess that perhaps they feel
that the drivers are currently good enough to meet the "GL on Linux"
project goals, but unfortunately, they are not *really* good enough for
everyday use.

I should mention that I also upgraded to XFree86 4.0.1 (from 3.3.6) at
the same time as installing the GLX drivers, so this may possibly be
part of the problem.

I have also installed the utah-glx drivers on a separate machine with an
ATI card.  The drivers seem much more reliable, but the ATI card is not
as fast as the TNT or as good at rendering textures. Utah-glx also have
drivers for nVidia Riva cards, which I might also try at some point.
Utah-glx is at http://utah-glx.sourceforge.net and runs on XFree86
3.3.6.

A recent "Ask Slashdot" article posed the question about which video
card has the best support under Linux, and there appeared to be a lot of
supporters for the Matrox G400, although apparently the 3D performance
wasn't quite up to the grade that nVidia sets.  The article is at
http://slashdot.org/askslashdot/00/12/20/2130231.shtml

Regards,
Martin

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