Hey all, I was just wondering if anybody else has tried the latest nVidia closed source driver?

I was hoping that the issue with Xorg freezing would be fixed. Anybody else experienced this? Xorg will lock up, but the mouse cursor still moves and background processes still run. Only way to keep it from freezing is to disable AGP.

I tried the new driver with AGPGART and nVidia AGP activated. AGPGART locks up just as fast as before, but with nVidia AGP activated, it stays up longer, but still freezes eventually.

Anybody else still experiencing issues or found a better fix?

I have 2 machines with NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX440 8x AGP cards in them.
One card is a fanless Apollo. I don't recall who manufactured the other.
The Apollo will not work with any of the NVIDIA drivers. I get the same symtoms
that you described.
I use the "nv" driver from Xorg and, with the execption of reduced GL performance,
It's fine. (watching DVD's and such)

The other card is humming along using the *6629 driver from NVIDIA and has
great performance.

There is quite a large thread about this on the NVIDIA linux forum, but I didn't
see any resolution.
That by the way is where I got the idea of using the Xorg "nv" driver which has
worked well with the Apollo card.


EDIT!!!
The card I talked about (using "nv" driver) is a *BIOSTAR* not Apollo!

The nv driver works for me as well, but I still would like a fix for the nvidia driver. I am trying to totally ditch Windows, and my main obstacle there is gaming. The only games I play in Windows anymore are HL2 and Morrowind, but that should change, hopefully, once I get a Cedega account. I, too, have searched a lot of nvidia boards and found a lot of solutions, but none of them work.

It's me again,
I've comitted a bit of an injustice.
Wanting to find some help with this NVIDIA driver thing, I pulled my
Apollo card out and googled the serial numbers.
It turns out to be a Biostar card. (though it came in an Apollo box)
Images I found of both brand of board confirm this.

I'm interested in the manufacturer of your board.
As I said before, both of my cards are GeForce4 MX440 8X,
yet one of them works perfectly with the NVIDIA drivers.
I haven't pulled the "good" card yet but I have used several NVIDIA
drivers on it, up to *6629, and the performance has gotten better each time.
I'm currently running a vanilla 2.6.10 kernel on a KT600/VT8237 board.

This makes me wonder if this relatively common problem isn't hardware related.

Can you guys clarify which drivers you are trying to use. The 7167 work fine for me, whereas the 6629 froze my system.

I'm using 7167 smoothly with a GeForceFX 5200 (vanilla 2.6.10 kernel).

Oddly my glxgears went from ~900 with 6629 to ~1100 with 7167.

I have a GeForce 4 Go (in a Dell Inspiron 8200) with the latest NVidia drivers (1.0-7167).

If I have the composite extension enabled, and I have xcompmgr running it locks up if I move a window (using KDE 3.3.0-5). If I have the composite extension enabled but xcompmgr is not running, then it locks up by itself eventually (I may not be doing anything at all).

X is quite stable if I remove the composite extension from xorg.conf.

I didn't have this problem with the previous version of the drivers (1.0-6629? can't remember exactly)

I have tried the 6629 and the 7167 drivers and both freeze with AGP enabled. I have a BFG GeForce 6800GT OC.

I emailed BFG tech support to see if they had any suggestions, but of course, as a suspected, they don't officially support Linux. But I did at least get a good long, human-typed response with some general suggestions. Of course, I've tried all of these to no avail.

This NVIDIA thing is odd.

I have 2 machines, both with MX440 8X AGP based cards.

Good machine:

KT600/VT8237 based mobo
Slack 10.1
Vanilla 2.6.10
Albatron MX440 with fan
Can use any NVIDIA driver (just installed 7167)

Bad machine:

KT400/VT8237 based mobo
Slack 10.1
Vanilla 2.6.10
Biostar MX440 fanless
cannot use NVIDIA drivers
(x freezes, keyboard freezes, pointer moves but has no function)

I swapped the cards.

Good machine gone bad.

Bad machine gone good:

7167 drivers give over 3300fps on glxgears.

This freezing problem is quite common, especially while using internet apps.
In my humble and limited opinion though it sure seems like a cheapo hardware
problem.

I haven't tried the card in another machine, but it works fine under Windows. And it used to work fine under Slackware 10. I haven't tried Slack again since these issues cropped up thought. It only started when I switched to Gentoo.

Any pointers to the real problem? Is it Xorg, hardware or Nvidia? There is a bugreport for Debian saying the same thing, but for me (mx 440) all drivers work very well. I just installed 7167, which works even better (still using Xfree86).

It does worry me a little......

I'm using Xorg. Never tried XFree86. I've seen reports of it on the Gentoo, NVNews, and the LQ forums. It's hard to pinpoint the exact problem though. It's even harder because the threads get flooded with people have similar, but unrelated problems. I'm pretty sure the common factors are Linux (duh), Xorg, and nVidia.

I had the same problem till I upgraded the kernel to 2.6.11-gentoo-r4. Using the latest Xorg and the nvidia 7167 driver I haven't had it freeze since I did this a week ago.

Here is the Xorg config I'm using. I hope it helps someone.

Section "Device"
Identifier "Videocard0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "Chaintech"
BoardName "FX5500 (generic)"
Option "NvAGP" "1"
Option "RenderAccel" "true"

That's not a vanilla kernel is it? I'm assuming it has some custom Gentoo patches. I might get that and try to adapt it to Arch.

One other thing I am going to try is to compile the nvidia driver myself with only support for AGP 4x. My mobo is 4x but the card is 8x. Maybe that is causing an issue, and I've seen some people with 8x mobo's having this problem and then turned it down to 4x or 2x in their BIOS and it was fixed. So maybe my card is still trying to run at 8x, I don't know. It's worth a try.