Kernel crash with nvidia-driver-173.14.12 7-STABLE/i386

[matthieu]

Hi,

Using 7-STABLE/i386 as of two days and driver version 173.14.12 on 8600GTS, I get a systematic crash when starting X. This occurs with 4G of RAM and doesn't with 2G. I joined a bug report generated on the machine running with 2G.

Is this a know bug ?
Is there a workaround ?
Is there a solution ?

Thanks for the answers

[rnejdl]

Unfortunately, there is no work around or solution at this time. The only way to run the nvidia driver on FreeBSD as far as I can tell is 2GB or less of ram. I'm not sure what happens with 3GB, but 4 is right out. Instant system hard freeze.

Rusty Nejdl

[matthieu]

Thanks for you reply.

Where did you get that information ?

[rnejdl]

It's posted in this forum but I didn't find it until after I ran into this. So, from personal experience, unfortunately. Nvidia does not play nice with PAE mapped memory. It sounds like a bit of progress has been made on this and some of the kernel features nvidia is requesting are coming down the pipe into 8.x and even the 7.x series but I don't know if that will be enough.

On another note, Nvidia has some work to do before then anyways as myself and others are unable to get any sort of compositing working and then open any sort of opengl app. Instant x-server crash. Many have noted that the 169 series drivers don't experience this but with a 9x board, that isn't an option for me.

Rusty

[zander]

Are you using PAE enabled kernels? The driver build should abort if built against PAE kernels, but it's possible that the check doesn't work right. Either way, I do not expect systems with large amounts of RAM to work at this point - this is mostly due to limitations of the mmap(2) character driver callback interface and the workarounds employed by the NVIDIA FreeBSD graphics driver. Work is being done to remove these limitations (see the last few messages to the FreeBSD/amd64 support thread), so 4+GB FreeBSD/i386 configurations should work properly at some point in the future.

[rnejdl]

btw, Zander noted in another thread that he has found and fixed the crash issue I mentioned. We're just pending the next rev of the 177 driver for that fix.

Rusty

[matthieu]

Hi,

Are you using PAE enabled kernels?

No, I'm not. I'm using a GENERIC kernel. Crash get more frequent despite I'm running with 2G. Quake doesn't not run anymore, it crashes my Xorg. Core file indicate it occurs in a context related to the nvidia driver (the stack contains call to the nvidia Xorg lib).

Is the 177 beta open to public test ?

[zander]

Yes, see ftp://download.nvidia.com/freebsd/177.68.

[rnejdl]

Zander,

Thanks! This new beta solves this issue and runs great!

Rusty