multiple cards, insmod, modules.conf

[gseidman]

I have two NVidia GeForce 4 MX 420 cards. One is in the AGP slot, the other is in a PCI slot. They work beautifully together under WIndowXP, so I am confident that the hardware setup is fine.

Under Linux, however, it seems like X is trying to load the kernel module twice, or something. X happily starts with one card working perfectly, but the other does nothing. XFree86 gives the following error lines:

(EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to initialize the NVdriver kernel module!
(EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***

This seems to be referring to the second card only, however. I have the following line in my /etc/modules.conf:

alias char-major-195 NVdriver

...and nvidia0, nvidia1, nvidia2, nvidia3, and nvidiactl are in /dev. The XFree86Config file has a separate Device (with appropriate BusID values) and Screen section for each card, and the ServerLayout refers to both.

I'm not sure what to do at this point. Do I need to add something to modules.conf to get the kernel module to load twice? Is it something in the XFree86Config? Has anyone gotten a similar setup to work?

System details:

Debian system
Linux kernel 2.4.18
compiled and installed NVIDIA drivers 2960
XFree86 4.2.0

[Klaus-P]

I think you should know the PCI Bus IDs for the "DEvice" sections in your
Xf86Config file. Close X or kdm or Xdm service. And on a textconsole
as root enter " XFree86 -scanpci ". In you Xfree86.log file you will find
your two Geforce cards, in the form PCI: 0:X:Y (for that one which is
plugged in the pci slot) and PCI: 1:A:B (for the other card in the agp slot
) X,Y,A,B are dummy variables here.

I've attached you a Xinerama-how-to, Probably it's also located somewhere
on your linux CDs. Well you don't need to install
Xinerama however it also could be used to check the two-cards
configuration as well. The How-To is worse reading in your case i think.
I have never set up two cards of that type on one machine and so no further
experience.

[gseidman]

The attachment didn't work for me, but I found the Xinerama HOWTO with Google. It basically told me to do all the same things I have already done. I got my bus IDs from scanpci rather than X -scanpci, but that's only because X -scanpci gives no output at all (yes, I stopped off gdm first). Note that I get a different error when I have the wrong BusID.

Does anyone have an example with two identical cards?

[r0gu3]

I used to have the same problems with my gf2 ultra agp and then with my geforce2mx pci ... the pci card could only be in certain slots, but in windows it needed to be in a different slot (i think because it reassigned its values using apic) so it may take a while to find a slot that works inside of both... I didn't have this problem with ANY other video cards, but you should be able to get it to work :)

- r0gu3