Screen "sleeps" for ½ sec. every 15 sec. after upgrading Nvidia driver.

[floppydisc]

Hi folks...

Subject almost says i all. I just got SuSE 8.2 by mail yesterday, and
naturally I installed the new driver from Nvidia for my GeForce 4 -
Ti4200. Installation went fine, but now the screen is "sleeping" for
about ½ seceond every once a while. Both in games and when woking on
the desktop. Quite anoying - even update of text when writing and
movement of the mouse stops.

Anyone experienced anything similar and/or know a solution?

Thanks
Esben

[bwkaz]

Is the nvidia driver maybe sharing an IRQ with something else? Check the output of cat /proc/interrupts.

[floppydisc]

Plenty... Here's the output:

floppydisc:/etc/X11 # cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 710494 XT-PIC timer
1: 8975 XT-PIC keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
5: 0 XT-PIC usb-uhci
8: 2 XT-PIC rtc
9: 0 XT-PIC acpi
10: 0 XT-PIC ehci-hcd, CMI8738-MC6
11: 32034 XT-PIC eth0, usb-uhci, usb-uhci, nvidia, bttv
12: 211968 XT-PIC PS/2 Mouse
14: 16896 XT-PIC ide0
15: 251 XT-PIC ide1
NMI: 0
LOC: 0
ERR: 0
MIS: 0
floppydisc:/etc/X11 #

...any idea what to do?

/Esben

[bwkaz]

Try disabling some of that stuff that you don't use -- especially the 4 different USB controllers -- in your BIOS.

Move the Ethernet card to another slot, too, to try to get it onto another IRQ.

And if you don't need it, disable bttv completely.

[floppydisc]

Well. First of all, ethernet is onboard. Of cause I could try to move the TV card, but shuld that really be necessary. After all it uset to work perfectly without irq-conflicts before I upgraded from SuSE 8.0 to 8.2.
Four USB controllers you say...? I can only see tree. I have six ports all in all. Two ports at the back and four ports at the front. I need the ports at the back for my printer, and also one at the front for memory-drive and camera.

Anyhow... I have a feeling that its the onboard network card that's making the conflict. At my first attempt to install nvidia driver - used an old .rpm - it conflicted really bad. I wasn't able to start network at all, so I made a total reinstall.

..thanks for your patiense
/Esben

[bwkaz]

You have 4 USB controllers. The three usb-uhci are the USB 1.1 controllers, and ehci-hcd is the USB 2 controller. Now that I think about it, that one probably controls 2 of the same ports as the USB 1.1 controller does, though. But there are 4 controllers.

Disable the USB 2 in your BIOS if you don't need it, although I doubt that that'll help much, since the nvidia driver isn't sharing an IRQ with the ehci-hcd driver, but the usb-uhci one.

You can also just plain disable the onboard Ethernet in your BIOS, and put a PCI card in there. They cost about $12 for a new 8139 or FA311 card. Play with the slot that it's in until you get it on a different IRQ.

It might also help to disable ACPI. It's sitting on IRQ 9 all by itself; if you free up IRQ 9, then other stuff (like eth0, usb-uhci, etc.) might be able to move to that IRQ. Might be worth trying that before buying a new network card.

What order are these modules loading in? It might help to load the "nvidia" module first, and the rest of them after it. Maybe.

[floppydisc]

I tried to move the TV card to an other slot, hence an other IRQ: Still the same.
I tried to disable onboard netword card: Computer locks totally when it reaches runlevel 5.
I tried to stress the network card by downloading af 700 MB file from an other computer at the same LAN: Now hold on tight - While downloading everything was smooth. As soon as it stoped downloading problem was the same.

I'm now sure the network card is causing the problem. But it doesn't seem to be possible to change the IRQ of either the video card or the network card from bios. Then what?

/Esben

[bwkaz]

What network chip is it (what kernel module are you using for it)?

Have you tried disabling ACPI at all?

[floppydisc]

No, not yet... I will in a moment...

I just booted from a Knoppix 3.2 cd, and this is the output from #cat /proc/interrupts

root@ttyp0[knoppix]# cat /proc/interrupts
CPU0
0: 60541 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 1035 IO-APIC-edge keyboard
2: 0 XT-PIC cascade
8: 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc
12: 14695 IO-APIC-edge PS/2 Mouse
14: 399 IO-APIC-edge ide0
15: 26129 IO-APIC-edge ide1
17: 1 IO-APIC-level bttv
19: 318 IO-APIC-level cmpci
21: 251 IO-APIC-level usb-uhci, usb-uhci, usb-uhci
23: 3759 IO-APIC-level eth0
NMI: 0
LOC: 60490
ERR: 0
MIS: 0


It seems Knoppix assigns the irq's totally different. Why is that? Is there a way to force SuSE to make a different assignment?

/Esben

[floppydisc]

Ahh. I didn't know what acpi was. I kept seaching in bios to disable it, until i read the demsg where it was suggested to boot with the option acpi=off... I think this was the trick. I guess I'll have to set that option in my boot manager so that it always does so?

I'll just keep testing...:)

Thanks until now...

/Esben

[bwkaz]

Knoppix has (in the kernel configuration) support for your IO-APIC (instead of the older XT-PIC) interrupt controller.

Using APICs allows IRQ numbers higher than 15 (possibly only up to 31, but I don't know for sure).

If you can manage to get SuSE to enable APIC support, that might be a good workaround. If nothing else, it'll give you a bunch more IRQs to use. The option is somewhere (in the kernel configuration) under "processor type and features", IIRC.

I tried APIC support a while back, but my USB mouse stopped working right -- it looked like the interrupts were just never getting transmitted to the driver. Probably just something with my board and/or the way I configured that kernel, though (I've got a KT333). If your USB devices work under Knoppix, that would be a start.

Edit: Just saw the second post. Yeah, modifying your bootloader to do that would probably work too. As long as you don't need ACPI for something else...

[floppydisc]

Now I'm confused..

What's APIC and what's ACPI?!?

/Esben

Works btw fine now. Even solved my soundcard problen as well...:)

[bwkaz]

APIC is the Advanced Programmable Interrupt Controller. It's the thing on the motherboard that controls which INTA, INTB, etc. line (from the PCI slots) gets assigned to which IRQ number from the CPU's perspective. Ideally, all PCI cards (and yes, this includes AGP) would use INTA, and each slot would be mapped to a different IRQ number, but that's not always the case. Anyway, newer APIC's (like the IO-APIC) allow more than 15 IRQ's, too.

ACPI, OTOH, is an interface to power management, PnP BIOS, and a bunch of other things. The only problem with it is that support is currently "experimental and incomplete", according to the help for the option in menuconfig.