KDE3, XF4.2 and NVidia

[grolschie]

Anyone having KDE 3 lockups where everything freezes except the mouse pointer? The only things that responds is magic SysRq key.

I am running Debian "Sid" and have tried many combinations of detonators, gcc, kernels, etc. NVidia's have always worked for me with no problems until now.

[grolschie]

I know that X in Debian "Sid" is compiled with GCC 3.2. Are the NVidia dets compiled with gcc 2.95 or 3.2?

[bwkaz]

I have a system compiled exclusively with gcc 3.2.

Driver 3123 works fine.

Driver 4191, which doesn't work fine (it has a relocation error in libGLcore.so related to a __divdi3 symbol), also doesn't lock anything up, so I doubt that that's your problem...

However, when I was using KDE 3 (initial releases of it, that is), I was running into segfaults all the time. I think the first few releases were just buggy; perhaps that has something to do with it, even though I sort of doubt it.

Maybe try backing down to 3123... or check for an updated KDE maybe? Thought I doubt that KDE would lock up the entire kernel... hmmm.

[DataPath]

KDE3, tested v3.1.1 on XFree86-4.3, nvidia driver v4191

grolschie and I have been communicating a lot... we both have the same problem. Its not the kernel that's locking up. using KDE3, even the most recent release 3.1.1, clicking on KDE menus (maybe doing other things... you can't get very far without using menus) causes the system to become unresponsive. the cursor moves, but no response from the keyboard, not even to change virtual terminals. Remote access still works, and it shows the "X" process to be using 100% of the CPU time. It sounds like an infinite loop kind of problem.

In my situation, the problem goes away when I turn of the "RenderAccel" option in XF86Config-4, but I'm not sure that that is the case for grolschie, as I don't believe he had that option turned on.

There was a message on an XFree86 development mailing list back in October of last year that suggested that the nVidia drivers weren't designed to be used with XFree86 4.3 (actually development version 4.2.99), and were likely to be rather unstable, and would likely continue to be so until XFree86 4.3 was officially released, and nVidia released a driver for it. I don't know if the subsequent release of 4191 was supposed to address that or not, but it would be helpful if we received confirmation of such.

[bwkaz]

That is a possibility, but I'm using X 4.3 and the old 3123's with no problems. Then again, I'm not using KDE anymore either.

The 4191 drivers were released quite a while before X 4.3, also (ah yes, Dec. 11 2002, from the download page), so AFAICT they're not a fix for that... hmm.

[Delleon]

I had the same problem, where kde would freeze but I could still move the mouse. I turned off RenderAccel and that appears to have fixed it. (I'm now running KDE 3.1.1 with XFree86 4.3 and the 4191 drivers.)

[micval]

Hi, lately I've been getting more and more of such lock-ups (mouse moving, system ready, but console unusable) in situations like opening an image into new window in mozilla and konqueror. I downgraded drivers from 1.0-4191 to 1.0-3123 and it seems to have solved the problem (at least the very image gets opened without lock-up).

I'm using Slackware 8.1, X 4.2, WindowMaker 0.80.0, mozilla 1.3, kde 3.1. on Athlon XP 1700, ECS K7S5AL MB and TNT2 Pro by manli.