[NTLUG:Discuss] SuSE 8.2 startup screen resolution

[Darin W. Smith]

On Wed, 04 Jun 2003 11:19:26 -0500, Chris Cox <cjcox at acm.org> wrote:

> You might just want to disable the fb boot up.  There are some
> bugs with the fb stuff (like having more than 1G of memory with
> certain Nvidia cards).
>

I wonder if this is the problem I've been fighting for almost 2 years now!

I had even gone so far as to work with an Nvidia engineer to track memory 
usage in their driver with no success.

My configuration:
Athlon 1.33 GHz
GeForce4 MX 440
1.5GB RAM
CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G is set
CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER is set

Using the 2d XFree nv driver, no problems.

Using NVidia's 3D full-featured drivers, what happens is for any amount of 
memory approaching or exceeding 1GB, the kernel can't vmalloc up space for 
certain things...like buffer space for my webcam driver, or even sometimes 
whatever it needs to fork a new process.  Stuff will start to launch and 
just die, and I found traces of that in the kernel logs, which led me to 
examine the kernel source producing the message and finding that it was out 
of vmalloc space.

Working with the Nvidia guy, we saw no memory leaks in their driver, but it 
was definitely gobbling up huge chunks of virtual address space and that 
led to the problem occurring.

I ran out of time and patience to deal with it, since every email back to 
Nvidia to a few days to hear back on.  I was about to try using the Nvidia 
AGPGart rather than the kernel AGPgart, but didn't have very high hopes for 
that working since they hadn't been able to reproduce the problem on a 
similarly equipped machine in their lab.

The FRAMEBUFFER stuff never occurred to me.  How did you find out about 
this?  I did some googling, but so far have come up empty.  I haven't been 
active on the kernel mailing list in over 2 years, so if there was 
discussion of this there, I missed it (guess I could go look at the 
archives).

I'll have to try turning off the framebuffer support tonight and see if 
everything is happy after doing that.

-- 
D!
Darin W. Smith
AIM: JediGrover