nVidia, Redhat 7.3, GeForce4 -- Weird freezing/pausing

[mike456]

Hi,

I have a weird problem where in OpenGL and just generally (although not as noticable) there is a very brief pause every about 0.5 to 1 second that lasts maybe 1/10th of a second. Ever since installing nVidia accelerated drivers for my linux. Its continous, and especially noticable when playing tuxracer, or when the screensaver is on.

Watching top, I notice that X will go up in CPU usage whenever the pause happens. This will occur whether I have no apps open or like 10 apps open. Nothing seems to affect it. Its almost like its retrying something that is failing and it retries like every second, and everytime it retries it pauses the whole computer for a very brief time. Its really annoying when clicking and dragging stuff around, as the mouse jumps after the freeze. Nothing scheduled in crond.

I can't hunt it down... No errors in XF86 logs, or system (/var/log). Any suggestions for narrowing it? Anybody have the same problem?

Thanks in advance,
M

I'm usng the nVidia 3123 drivers (Aug.27th), i've run the nv_check.sh script and everything checks out. I do get the nVidia logo at startup so I know I'm using the nvidia drivers.

My setup is: athlon 1.2, ASUS A7V266E (256MB), Asus V8170-nvidia GEFORCE420-64MB DDR-AGP, Redhat 7.3, XFree info:

XFree86 Version 4.2.0 (Red Hat Linux release: 4.2.0-8) / X Window System
(protocol Version 11, revision 0, vendor release 6600)
Release Date: 23 January 2002

[ale]

Hi mike,

I'm experimenting a similar problem with same Nvidia driver as you. At a random point the system activate the screen saver (I have a black screen as screensaver so no glx related problem). Then everything works as usal but I can't use the drag'n'drop funcions anymore. Scrollbars doesn't work if I drag them and I can't drag desktop icons anymore. Nothing in the logs, the problem doesn't disappear if I restart X server, only if I reboot. The problem (screen blanks for a while) keeps repeating after the first time. My gl application still works as usual: Mesa reflect 241fps in 5 seconds before and after the screen blanks. No idea of what it is for. I partially solved the problem disabling the screensaver, no problem by know but who knows..:(
My system:

processor: AMD Athlon XP 1700+
motherboard: Kinetiz K7
chipset: KT133A
Graphic card: TNT2 M64 (AGP)
System memory: 640MB
kernel: 2.4.19
Xfree: 4.2.1
distro: Mandrake 9.0
Desktop: KDE 3.0.3

Have the option mem=nopentium in my lilo.conf.
Ale.