X locks on start up

[Arthur]

I posted a while back on here a problem I had with X locking. I never did find out the problem. However I did find some of my memory was dodgy. Just finished reinstalling everything with good ram now and I'm still having a problem with the nvidia drivers.

Basically X locks, just after it prints this in the log:-

(II) NVIDIA(0): AGP 4X successfully initialized
(II) NVIDIA(0): Setting mode "1600x1200"

When running 'top', X will be hogging all the cpu time, so its probably doing something.

I've tried drivers 3123 and 2960. The former just gives a screen of asci garbage (80cols x 25 lines), the latter one gives me random coloured vertical lines, when it crashes.

I have an Asus 6800 DDR deluxe , in a Gigabyte GA-8SIML mobo. This board does have an onboard SIS650 card, however the manual says this will get disabled automatically when another card is used.

I've tried disabling the mtrr's, in case one was referring to the old card. They do look like this:
reg00: base=0xe0000000 (3584MB), size= 128MB: write-combining, count=9
reg01: base=0xea000000 (3744MB), size= 16MB: write-combining, count=1
reg02: base=0x00000000 ( 0MB), size= 128MB: write-back, count=1

Which is curious as the agp memo hole is set to 16M in the bios. And I only have 128M main ram anyway. Could this be the source of problems?

The card works fine with the NV driver that comes with XFree86.

I got this crash with a clean stock install of RedHat 7.3. I've since upgaded the kernel to: 2.4.18-18.7.x, I'm running Xfree86 4.2.0

Stuff you may want to look at is here:
XF86Config-4 (http://fubaby.com/XF86Config-4)
XFree86.0.log (http://fubaby.com/XFree86.0.log)

Arthur

[Chalnoth]

Load "glx" should not be commented out.

[Arthur]

Surely not loading the GLX driver won't stop X from booting, just stop you running OpenGL apps? It was just giving me hassle as I keep switching back to the 'nv' driver, so I can use X.

Eitherway, I tried it with and without, no difference.

I've also tried disabling agp:
Option "NvAGP" "0"
to no avail. Haven't been able to get it to use the Nvagp driver instead of the agpgart one. Don't know if that'll make a difference.

I'm still suspecting something to do with the mtrr's being too big. When it locks, I log in from else where, run top, and I get this output:-

[Arthur]

Carrying on from the last message... top outputs this:-

PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM TIME COMMAND
1239 root 15 -10 134M 6736 1956 R < 99.9 5.3 2:58 X
1295 root 15 0 1040 1040 848 R 0.1 0.8 0:00 top
1 root 15 0 476 476 420 S 0.0 0.3 0:03 init

As you can see X is using like 134M, I only have 128M in the machine. So I'm wondering if the nvidia drivers are blagging it all, causing X to run out of memory and lock.

Thoughts? Any solutions? Anyone know how to alter your mtrr's?

Arthur

[Chalnoth]

That's a good question. Try reducing your AGP aperture.

[Arthur]

That didn't make any difference. Tried both increasing it and decreasing it. Exactly the same symtoms.

I'm begining to wonder whether there is some clash of memory ranges, which the card and something else on board are sharing.