Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

I am having terrible problems getting the integrated geforce 8300 on my motherboard to work with the nvidia linux drivers. I am currently trying out the 177.80 driver which crashes compiz within several minutes (sometimes it is ok for upto an hour) of starting. Even before this, maximizing windows or resizing them to be fairly large causes the window not to be updated. On crashing, the machine freezes and compiz takes up 100% cpu. Usually, but not always, it is possible to ssh in and kill (only kill -9 works) compiz to recover the session. This somehow seems to cause the graphics acceleration to die with glxgears slowing down to 60 fps (not just glxgears but all 3d slows down to a crawl) from 2000 fps. However, compiz can be restarted and works apart from the bugs mentioned above and being rather slow. Future crashes of compiz are again handled with the ssh and kill -9. I am attaching the bug report file below. I have tried using the pci=nommconf and idle=poll options on booting with no success.

Another extremely odd thing is that I can -physically- here a noise when running glxgears or any 3d intensive application!

Any help will be much appreciated as the nvidia driver in this configuration is as slow as the nv one on a 8500gt (nv does not work with the 8300 as yet unfortunately).

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

Anyone? bump.

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

Finally upgraded to a 2nd hand 7600 gt and am doing fine with the open source nv driver. I am done with the nvidia linux drivers and their lack of support. :argh:

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

I am running Fedora 10 on the same board as you and had no issues with the released driver, and am currently running the latest beta driver. Have you checked the following threads which are stickied at the top of the forum ?

• Installing NVIDIA Linux graphics drivers on recent distributions (FC, Ubuntu, etc)
  http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=72490
• If you have a stability problem, PLEASE read this first
  http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=58498
• If you have a performance problem, PLEASE read this first
  http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=118088

Cheers

Dave K.

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

Dave, and others,

this is partly offtopic, but just partly, since it's almost the only feedback I've found so far on Fedora and this chipset...

I have an ASUS motherboard with AMD X2 cpu and Geforce 6130 on which I was running Fedora 9 x86_64.
The board died yesterday, so I need to replace it asap since that is my work computer. Ideally, since I
have Fedora 9 on the drive, I would like to replace it with another motherboard on which that distro will
work as is. Hence my question, since you say that Fedora 10 works OK for you. As far as you know, will the Geforce 8300 on the Asus M3N78-EM motherboard work Ok if I connect it to that hard drive? By "OK" I mean that I just need to have 2d video and network working immediately, so I can continue working and fix any extra function or upgrade to Fedora 10 later, after I've released the current projects.

THanks for any feedback,
M.

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

Hey,

It should work fine in my opinion, just make sure you install the latest stable NVIDIA linux driver.

Dave K.

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

You'll find that I encounter almost exactly the same problem. With identically the same mainboard. It does seem, though, that the non-PRO version (Asus M3N78-EM et al) seem to work. But that doesn't help at all once you have that piece of hardware in front of you, I know. I really want 3D, though.
All in all, a big letdown. And I was so happy with the cheapo BIOSTAR TF-7050, which has been doing all of that for me for the last 18 months. Not cool at all what this combination of ASUS and NVIDIA does to us.

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

I have the same board as well and I have been through many troubles to get it working.

Hardware
Asus M3N78 Pro
3Gb Ram
Amd Phenom Quad core
No PCI/PCI-E cards added at the moment

Here is what I have done that seems to work at the moment

NV drivers 185.19
Ubuntu 8.04.2 64bit
I compiled a 2.6.29 kernel (nothing special done just upgraded to 2.6.29)
kernel boot paramters
idle=poll
pci=nommconf
ata_generic.all_generic_ide=1 ( should only be needed if using ide drives perhaps only if booting ide)

NOTE: I had read somewhere the using "pci=nomsi" was needed, that will cause problems with the method below so if you have it remove it.

The key things for me were all dealing with IRQs
The basic idea is to get everything possible using MSI except the Nvidia driver

Here is my /proc/interups file

CPU0 CPU1 CPU2 CPU3
0: 49 0 0 2540 IO-APIC-edge timer
1: 0 0 0 2 IO-APIC-edge i8042
4: 0 0 0 1 IO-APIC-edge
6: 0 0 0 5 IO-APIC-edge floppy
7: 1 0 0 0 IO-APIC-edge
8: 0 0 0 1 IO-APIC-edge rtc2
9: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-fasteoi acpi
12: 0 0 0 4 IO-APIC-edge i8042
14: 0 0 209 626464 IO-APIC-edge pata_amd
15: 0 0 0 0 IO-APIC-edge pata_amd
19: 0 0 0 3 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci1394
20: 0 0 101 437298 IO-APIC-fasteoi nvidia
21: 0 0 0 1 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb2
22: 0 0 289 2764490 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci_hcd:usb1, ehci_hcd:usb4
23: 0 0 147 1648857 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci_hcd:usb3
28: 0 0 24 85647 PCI-MSI-edge ahci
29: 0 1 7106 46737406 PCI-MSI-edge eth0
30: 0 0 242 24970 PCI-MSI-edge HDA Intel

Notice that ahci,eth0 and HDA Intel all use MSI which means that the PCI IRQs do not have to do any sharing. The firewire(ochi1394) , nvidia and usbs all have there own IRQ. This has resulted in stability for me.

The only tricky one is the sound (HDA Intel) you need to edit the following
/etc/modprobe.d/options

add this line somewhere in it

options snd_hda_intel enable_msi=1


I am not sure if using kernel 2.6.29 is needed it was just one of the many things I was trying to get stability with X.

The nvidia driver I am using does not seem to like msi enabled on this board. It also does not like to share an IRQ with something that does a reasonable amount of bandwidth.

I had nvidia and one of the usb hubs sharing an IRQ at one point and every time I used alot of usb bandwidth the system would freeze.

I do not know if this is related to the "IRQF_DISABLED" messages in other posts but sharing for this motherboard seems to be really bad for stability.

My system has been stable for about 2-3 weeks now, this is a record for this box. At one point I could not even login to X it would crash loading X.

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

my system is running quite stable on this motherboard, although
Is there any way to change IRQ?
zkmyth, how did you managed to assign every device it's special IRQ?

updating bios will reduce this sound

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

Qwertyed: It looks like your Nvidia driver is sharing an IRQ with a USB1 hub.

This can be stable since USB1 is mostly used for things like keyboard/mice/etc nowadays and those device do not do generate much data.

I have not been able to control how the IRQs are shared at boot so it is possible on your next reboot it will be shared with something else and cause problems. Not for sure but possible, I had encountered periods of stability like this before. If you don't use any USB1 hardware on that hub then you have the nvidia driver on it's own irq more or less.

you can run "lsusb" to see what bus your usb hardware is on and compare that to your /proc/interrupts file


To alter the IRQ you need to check if you kernel has PCI MSI enabled. Your /proc/interupts would look similar to mine with some of the devices showing "PCI-MSI-edge". If you don't see any then I would doubt that your kernel has MSI enabled.

I do not yet know how to determine if the default kernel has PCI-MSI enabled without looking in the kernel config file.

You might find some config files under /boot/

If you do find the one for your kernel version. You can see your kernel version with "uname -r"

If you find a config file for it then you can use this command to see if PCI-MSI is enabled

cat config-filename | grep CONFIG_PCI_MSI

you should see

CONFIG_PCI_MSI=y

if not then I would think that MSI is NOT enabled and you could build a new kernel, update your system to a newer kernel or update the whole system.

I pretty much use ubuntu only now and all of this applies to it. With other distros some things can be different.

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

zkmyth,

I think you hit the nail on its head!
Here I could provoke stability problems with the very latest driver (185.18.08) and my trusted old 6200 card; when the BIOS was set to PnP: 'No'; because the IRQ was shared. Then I set the BIOS to PnP: 'Yes', and I got a standalone interrupt:

...
15: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge pata_amd
16: 22 8399 IO-APIC-fasteoi nvidia
19: 0 3 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci1394
20: 25 4143 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci_hcd:usb3
21: 9 2446 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb2, HDA Intel
...

and no more stability problems at all. Then I rebooted, removed the 6200. Alas, whatever I do now in the BIOS, I get shared interrupt for nvidia, and stability problems at once:

...
15: 0 0 IO-APIC-edge pata_amd
19: 0 2 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci1394
20: 2 393 IO-APIC-fasteoi ohci_hcd:usb3, nvidia
21: 2 2468 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb2, HDA Intel
22: 9 1295 IO-APIC-fasteoi ehci_hcd:usb1
...

Aside of the nvidia, the interrupts remain the same. And IRQ 20 happens to be the mouse, and nvidia doesn't seem to like that at all.
So the question remains, how to get nvidia to use a free interrupt (like 16 in the earlier case)?

Uwe

Re: Asus M3N78 Pro with igp geforce 8300 woes on 64 bit ubuntu
 

udippel

I would suggest the following

1: try to get everything but nvidia on PCI-MSI. This can be difficult since you might need to rebuild a kernel with PCI_MSI enabled.

1a: You might be able to tell if MSI is enabled by doing the following
(the following commands need to be run as root, you can use sudo , su , or login as root )

rmmod snd_hda_intel
modprobe snd_hda_intel enable_msi=1

then check your /proc/interrupts file to see it is listed with PCI-MSI-edge

Note: I have not tested this so it might not work for determining if you have MSI enabled or not, the kernel config file would be better. You might have to google for it but it should be available somewhere if you are using the stock kernel for your distro.

2: Turn off firewire (ohci1394) if you don't need it and see if that will free up an irq for nvidia

3: Move what ports your usb devices are on to get the nvidia driver on it's own irq more or less. Check /proc/interrupts and lsusb after boot, maybe turn off X once you know what irq nvidia is using.