System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

I just bought a "new" graphics card. Before I had a Geforce 2 Ti, but I wanted to get image to two screens at the same time (monitor and tv). So I bought "Geforce4 MX 4000" (NV18). That's what lspci tells me. I really didn't care about the cards capabilities as long as I can get tv-out and monitor working at the same time.

Anyways... Startx hangs the system. Screen goes black and after a few seconds monitor goes off. Ctrl+Alt+Backspace won't work, ctrl+alt+f# won't work... I still can ssh to the system. I can see Xorg.0.log stuck in loading something and top tells me xorg is taking 99% of cpu time. I'm unable to kill process of xorg. I also can't reboot or shutdown. It simply won't. That goes on... At least for 12 hours. (I was 200km away and unable to reboot the computer :) ).

I've tried this with Xorg-6.8.2, -6.9 and -7.0, Gentoo and Debian, nVidia drivers versions 6111 to 8178 (Ok. Not every one. But I tried several). Also tried with XFree... the version in Debian Sarge. Same thing happens every time. Except that when I try to kill XFree the system totally hangs and I really can't do anything. Not even ssh to the machine.

Re: System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

Are you using the latest BIOS for the motherboard?

Also, I'd like to see a bug report against 1.0-8178.

Thanks,
Lonni

Re: System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

Almost, I have the same problem. But my OS is FreeBSD 5.4. Also I try
this on FreeBSD 5.3 ang xorg-server 6.9.0 and 6.8.2 and xorg-server-snap 6.8.x and lower with
driver NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-1.0-7174 and NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-1.0-7676 and NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-1.0-8178.
After startx - xorg start fine (grey screen) and mouse appear. And
nothing more. I can to connect over ssh and top tells me xorg is
taking 99% of cpu time. But with NVIDIA-FreeBSD-x86-1.0-6111 I have
no problem. My video Gforce 4200Ti AGP8X. My motherboard - Soltek
75-FRV2. But I have been upgraded BIOS 1 year ago.

system hangs with new kernel only
 

I am trying to upgrade to the latest kernel (2.6.14-1.1656) from the one shipped with FC4 (2.6.11-1.1369). After booting to a shell with the kernel the first time, I ran the Nvidia driver installation. When I reboot, the system hangs when X is starting. The system ran fine and still runs fine with the same driver and the old kernel. The driver file I am using is NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-1.0-8178-pkg2.run

The attached bug report was generated after hitting the reset key so I don't know how useful it is.

Re: System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

jdehls,
I don't see anything unusual in your bug report.

If you boot with the noapic and/or acpi=off kernel parameters does that have any impact on this problem?

Thanks,
Lonni

Re: System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

Using acpi=off, the system won't boot completely. It hangs with the message:
irq5: nobody cared

Using noapic, or both noapic and acpi=off, the system boots, X fails to start and says so, but I can still get to a command prompt without the system freezing. However, I get serious disk errors. I was able to generate a bug report both times before rebooting. No I am back to the old kernel again.

I have attached both reports. They are gzipped to beat the 100k limit and a .txt extension added to beat the filetype rule for attachments.

Re: System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

I don't see anything in the new bug reports that wasn't in the original. Just to confirm, the original FC4 kernel doesn't trigger this problem, just the latest?

I don't suppose you have a 2nd system and a serial cable available to setup a serial console, do you?

I'll see if I can locate this motherboard here to reproduce this problem.

Thanks,
Lonni

Re: System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

Yes, driver is completely stable with original FC4 kernel. I have a second pc in the room running XP pro. I have cygwin-x installed and can ssh etc to the problem machine (also vnc). I don't know anything about serial consoles. When the system crashes, however, it is really crashed and doesn't respond over the network.

Re: System hangs with nvidia-driver
 

I suspect I've seen this problem as well with the more recent FC4 kernels, and after discussion with development it was determined to be a kernel bug, not a driver bug. For what its worth, the problem does not seem to occur with the latest FC5 test kernels.

If you could capture the crash output in a serial console I could confirm whether you're seeing the same problem. Without that output, I'm afraid there isn't much more that I can do.

Thanks,
Lonni

Problem solved: new kernel
 

I guess you were right about it being a kernel problem. 2.6.15-1.1830 was released yesterday. I updated and installed drivers. Everything went flawlessly. Thanks for your help.