nvidia stability [LWN.net]

nvidia stability

Posted Oct 5, 2004 16:57 UTC (Tue) by louie (subscriber, #3285)
In reply to: The future of Linux multimedia (NewsForge) by einstein
Parent article: The future of Linux multimedia (NewsForge)

Speaking with my gnome bugmaster hat on, for a long time, the only known scenario where gnome could hang your machine happened specifically only with the proprietary NVidia drivers. We got reports of it all the time. And we couldn't debug it, because it was proprietary. And it took nearly two years for NVidia to fix it. So, I guess you've been lucky.

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nvidia stability

Posted Oct 5, 2004 18:29 UTC (Tue) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

Speaking with my gnome bugmaster hat on, for a long time, the only known scenario where gnome could hang your machine happened specifically only with the proprietary NVidia drivers.

He's mistaken, I could easily, instantly and repeatably hang a machine with an ATI video card and DRI deader than a doornail, regardless of window manager, by running some screensaver or 3D FPS...

Re: nvidia stability

Posted Oct 5, 2004 19:57 UTC (Tue) by Wills (guest, #1813) [Link]

einstein wrote:

I could easily, instantly and repeatably hang a machine with an ATI video card and DRI deader than a doornail, regardless of window manager, by running some screensaver or 3D FPS...

Please give a specific example of how you can "instantly and repeatably hang a machine with an ATI video card and DRI". Please give the names and version numbers of your applications that trigger the crash, the ATI video chipset and the ATI Linux driver. I'm calling your bluff because I don't believe it's a generic problem with ATI's Linux drivers. I have had no problems using ATI's Linux driver on a laptop with a ATI Mobility Radeon 9600.

Re: nvidia stability

Posted Oct 5, 2004 22:03 UTC (Tue) by ranger (guest, #6415) [Link]

Easy:

1)Install ati's fglrx 3.9.0 on a distro running XFree86-4.3 on a machine with a Radeon 9200 Mobility
2)Start X
3)Start a 2nd X (ie via KDE's "Start new session" menu entry, or via startx -- :1)
4)Change back to the first X instance (ie CTRL-ALT-F7)

Press your reset button, it's the only thing left to do. It works on every machine I've tested it on, without fail.

NVidia has never done this, neither does the open-source radeon driver from XOrg (which also performs just as well on this hardware).

Re: nvidia stability

Posted Oct 5, 2004 22:19 UTC (Tue) by Wills (guest, #1813) [Link]

ranger wrote:

1) Install ati's fglrx 3.9.0

Version 3.9.0 of the fglrx driver is really far too old. You need to get fglrx version 4.3.0 or later. Your example works fine with fglrx-4.3.0 on an ATI Mobility Radeon 9600.