athlon agp bug??

[crazyowl]

has anyone been affected by the athlon agp memory corruption bug .... all opengl games crash after 5 -10 minutes ... i have a 1.2g t-bird .... i have found a patch and a small amount of info .. but nothing on how to install the patch etc.. i have tried he mem = nopentium in grub but to no avail ......

[chazmati]

Did you check this post?

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?s=&threadid=922

I know it says SMP but this may work for uniprocessor systems too.

Chaz

PS - Are you running Red Hat? Tried 2.4.18-10 yet?

[crazyowl]

yes this is on REd hat 7.3 ... 2.4.18-10 same problem as 2.4.18-3 original install ...

[DisAstro]

Very strange... I have RH 7.3 and an Athlon 1.2 Tb...
I have no problem with opengl games...
Maybe in combination with the mainboard, I have a MSI K7T Turbo with VIA KT133A Chipset...

I was using the 2.4.18-3 kernel, just upgraded, so it is still possible that it hangs now...

Try compiling the nvidia drivers yourself... just download the SRPM's and use the "rpm --rebuild " option...

Do you use Ximian-gnome? I had problems playing games in that... but that was with RH 7.2...
try playing it in KDE or so... maybe that helps... (it helped for me...)

[crazyowl]

i'm using KDE and i installed the drivers from the tar.gzips
.. are u suggesting i remove ximiam-gnome from the system??

[DisAstro]

no, thats not what I mean...
I had Ximian gnome, and there the games crashed, but when I switched to KDE - just log out and log in in KDE, the games didn't crash any more...
and now, with rh 7.3, I removed Ximian-gnome, and the games don't crash in gnome any more...
there must be a bug in the ximian-gnome packages...

[crazyowl]

ok i think i have it working now i got this reply from nvidia
that helped me .. i'll report back later to confirm that this fix works ...A few things pop into mind regarding your problems:

1) Known AGP issues. Do these symptoms disappear when you disable AGP
support? You can try this by adding the line

Option "NvAgp" "0"

to the appropriate Device section of your XF86Config-4 file.

2) The "streaky textures" suggest that you might have some stray Mesa libGL
files floating around. Are there any libGL.so files in /usr/X11R6/lib? If
so, does removing them fix your problem?

Thanks!

[crazyowl]

further update .. well ok it seems if i set nvagp 0 then opengl game run fine but konqueror crashes ...

i fixed this by setting nvagp 2 as advised on the KDE web site and now everything appears to be fine....

so anyone with an athlon (t bird) system with an nvidia card to solve agp instability try using
option nvagp 2

in your device section of your XFree86-4 config file...

im now going to see if the mem=nopentium option for lilo/grub
makes any difference i.e by removing it ...

[Anthaus]

Now that you mention it, I had that problem with my old motherboard (VIA KT133A). I had to use the nopentium trick, but I lost some performance.

Now I use a KT266A motherboard and guess what... I forgot to add the nopentium line at GRUB!! I hadn't noticed before precisely because my system is running rock solid. I switched to RH 7.3 from RH 7.2, as well. Perhaps that had something to do with it. But I've had no problems with the three kernels I've tried (2.4.18-3, 2.4.18-5 and 2.4.18-10).

I remember from a while back that nVidia and AMD blamed each other for this bug. It seems both pieces of hardware tend to fight overa certain part of the AGP texture memory, hence the hard-lockups.

No official fix has been released, AFAIK.

[jonabbey]

I've also seen major stability problems with Red Hat 7.3 out-of-the-box on a 1ghz Athlon system.

I've turned off the AGP support as advised here, and things seem to be better. Thank goodness.. my system has been completely unstable when I do any OpenGL stuff.

Has there been any definitive word whether RedHat's 7.3-18 Kernel fixes this issue? Any word on whether a future version of the NVidia driver can do anything about this stability problem on Athlon AGP?

[jonabbey]

Originally posted by crazyowl
further update .. well ok it seems if i set nvagp 0 then opengl game run fine but konqueror crashes ...

i fixed this by setting nvagp 2 as advised on the KDE web site and now everything appears to be fine....

so anyone with an athlon (t bird) system with an nvidia card to solve agp instability try using
option nvagp 2

in your device section of your XFree86-4 config file...

im now going to see if the mem=nopentium option for lilo/grub
makes any difference i.e by removing it ...

What does nvagp 2 do?

[jonabbey]

Well, Quake 3 relatively quickly crashed for me even with NvAgp option set to 0. This is with the latest NVidia drivers, and RedHat 2.4.18-3. I'm using an 1ghz Athlon mb with a KT133A motherboard.

Downloading RedHat 2.4.18-18 now.

[jonabbey]

Okay, I've upgraded to RedHat's 2.4.18-10 Kernel, and tried NvAGP set to 0 and 2. In all permutations so far, I still get crashes within half an hour or so of playing.

I just edited /etc/grub.conf to add the mem=nopentium option, and I'll see how that goes, but so far nothing seems able to make the latest NVidia drivers stable on my Athlon (not XP or MP) system.

[jonabbey]

Even with mem=nopentium, my system reboots instantly upon entering into a game (i.e., just before the first 3d display should appear) in the latest Tribes 2 beta patch for Linux.

Here's my stats, again:

RedHat 2.4.18-10
Latest NVidia drivers
Option NvAgp = 0 or 2, both crash
mem=nopentium, still crash, at least in Tribes2

This is on a 1ghz Athlon, not XP or MP, on a Epox
8Kta3+ running a KT133A chipset.

Here's hoping that NVidia knows that they have a real problem on Athlon.

[jonabbey]

I'm running a GeForce 4MX 440. If I was still using my old GeForce 2MX, I'd try running an older NVidia driver (I'm running NVRM version: NVIDIA NVdriver Kernel Module 1.0-2960 Tue May 14 07:41:42 PDT 2002
GCC version: gcc version 2.96 20000731 (Red Hat Linux 7.3 2.96-110) now)

[gopal]

I'm having more serious problems. My server crashes every few days with a kernel OOPS (page_alloc:117). And this is even if I don't use any OpenGL applications. Still, I expect all of these problems could be related. There has been some discussion of this crash on the web but no solution proposed. I think there is some relation to the problems reported here since all have AMD/AGP/NVIDIA in common.

Has anyone tried using the following hint

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=102376926732464&w=2

on a 2.4.18 kernel?

Gopal

[TheOneKEA]

Strange. I have a 2.4.19 kernel with the 1.0-2960 drivers running on a VIA KT133A (Abit KT7A rev 1.2, with the 7N BIOS). I haven't had any problems whatsoever, even with earlier kernels and earlier drivers.

[crimsun]

Originally posted by gopal
I'm having more serious problems. My server crashes every few days with a kernel OOPS (page_alloc:117). And this is even if I don't use any OpenGL applications. Still, I expect all of these problems could be related. There has been some discussion of this crash on the web but no solution proposed. I think there is some relation to the problems reported here since all have AMD/AGP/NVIDIA in common.

Has anyone tried using the following hint

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=linux-kernel&m=102376926732464&w=2

on a 2.4.18 kernel?

Gopal

This patch was only recently merged into 2.4.20-pre (should be pre2). I have no way of testing its success since I have long since junked my Athlon.