Problems with 173.14.35 and xorg 1.12

[joedoe]

First off, thanks to Nvidia for finally releasing this prerelease legacy driver .

I have tried to get it to work on my three Debian systems - stable, testing and unstable - and only got lucky with the first.

Surely, installing it to Debian Stable was not really necessary (because it still runs xorg 1.7, so 173.14.31 still works fine), but I just wanted to check whether it worked anyway. No problem there.

Installing 173.14.35 to Debian Testing and Unstable seemed to go flawlessly, but running it was a different story altogether. These Debian flavors both run xorg 1.12 and according to the README this should work. So far I have seen this behavior after launching X:

1. The screen goes blank and nothing happens... Until I move the mouse and the screen goes black and the gui loads. X seems fine after that and everything just works. Seems there is some power saving issue going on here.

Or

2. The screen goes blank and the system basically freezes beyond recovery.

I have attached the xorg log that goes with scenario 1. Btw, I have obliterated the previously installed nouveau driver and any trace of it, so this is not part of the mix here.

Just wondering if anyone got this driver to work decently with xorg 1.12?

[Natrio]

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=183079
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=183072

[mereset]

The 173.14.35 driver is working well for me with a similar setup as yours. (FX5200 -128MB, Debian Unstable with X.Org: 1.12.1.902). I am using the 3.4 series kernel (3.4-trunk-486) from Debian experimental, I've never tried a -rt kernel version.

I know you said you "obliterated" all traces of the nouveau driver but I'm wondering if the nouveau kernel module has been blacklisted?

There should be a /etc/modprobe.d/blahblah-filename.conf file with the following line:

blacklist nouveau

to stop the nouveau kernel module from loading at bootup.

Instead of a nouveau blacklist file in the /etc/modprobe.d directory, you could also disable the loading of the nouveau module in grub with either the nouveau.modeset=0 or nomodeset option. {according to the "Kernel command line:" line shown in your Xorg.0.log you aren't using either of those options}

[joedoe]

Originally Posted by mereset

The 173.14.35 driver is working well for me with a similar setup as yours. (FX5200 -128MB, Debian Unstable with X.Org: 1.12.1.902). I am using the 3.4 series kernel (3.4-trunk-486) from Debian experimental, I've never tried a -rt kernel version.

I know you said you "obliterated" all traces of the nouveau driver but I'm wondering if the nouveau kernel module has been blacklisted?

[...]

Yup, done all that. Like I said: obliterated, gone for good.

Originally Posted by Natrio

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=183079
http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=183072

Different problems. When X gets launched succesfully, it just works, no quirks.

[joedoe]

Solved. I finally found the cause of the problem to be the kernel. I was using Debian's RT-kernel (including realtime patch set) and it just doesn't get along with the Nvidia driver module. Although the driver builds and loads, the system gets very unstable.