Nvidia 7174 Woes
 

Hi all,

I'm an old user of Slack (though still a newbie), and after using SuSE 9.1 for a while and finding it too slow on my Toshiba S3000-400 laptop, I installed Slack 10.1 again.

The 2.4.29 kernel was fine but gave me too many problems with cd writing (if hdc as scsi in lilo, then I can't read cds burned by windows). So I took a deep breath and installed and compiled the 2.6.10 kernel using Patrick's sample config file.

All was fine until I installed Nvidia's 7174 driver. It installed alright, and I changed xorg.conf's file to have "nvidia" instead of "vesa" but when I startx, the screen shuts down and I have to reset, and wait for the ext3 recovery, etc. etc. Now I can't even go back to "vesa" to have X.

If I modprobe nvidia, I get the message "Fatal: Inserting nvidia (/lib/modules/2.6.10/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.ko): invalid module format, though I'm pretty sure I included it in the compile.

Any ideas? No more compiles, please (it takes forever)!

Desperately wanting to keep Slackware!

Thanks.

Hey Odin,

You're clearly not the only one finding these problems (http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=49417). You'll notice right at the bottom, things work fine =)

The basic steps you need to take, therefore, are:

1. download fresh kernel source (2.6.11 seems to be the favourite with 7174) from kernel.org (not Slackware.com!!)
2. copy .config file from your existing 2.6 kernel into the fresh downloaded one and run "make oldconfig"
3. make all && make install
4. then reinstall the nvidia driver

There are gazillions of 2.6-kernel-compile posts, but if you need more personalised help, just gimme a yell =)

- Piete.

[Edit]
The other option (marginally faster than kernel recompile) is to try an older nvidia driver, maybe 6629 or similar. From reading the posts, it seems the problem lies more in the 2.6 in Testing/ than in the nvidia driver, tho'.

Hey, Piete,

Thanks a lot, will do and get back to you once it's done!

Cheers!

I'm really, really curious. Is this a Geforce Go card?

It's a GeForce2 Go with 16Mb of memory.

Piete, could you help with some step-by-step help on how to add the new kernel on top of the 2.6.10 I have? Thanks a million!

Yea, I knew it.... I hate to burst your bubble but I wouldn't expect too much. I'm currently building 2.6.11.8 as we speak just to see if some of the 2.6.11rc5 changes actually make a difference as that link from above may suggest. I actually have read that thread before but chalked it up to being irrelevant. I must have missed his card identifier in the xorg.cong.txt....

I've been fighting this problem for years, literally, years. A modified twice over v4620 from what was once minion.de is the only thing that will work on older geforce go cards... You can see my rants all over the Linux nvidia forums dating back atleast 2 years... Actually, if you spend an entire day searching thru their forums, you'll find hundreds of pissed of laptop owners... I'm afraid Nvidia could care less about it's laptop users. Seriously. They don't care. They refuse to even acknowledge laptops under windows so I suppose it's nice to atleast see that they "claim" to support laptops under Linux. Anyway....

There should be a nice walk through on kernel compile/instalations at the top of this forum... It's been beaten to death so it's a sticky.... ;)

If and when you get fed up with trying to get nvidia drivers working, I can give you a link to ones that work. I'm crossing my fingers but I've been burned too much to get my hopes up too much with a new kernel....

I will take the link to the drivers that work :) I am running the nv driver still..

Try following the steps in the sticky posts at the top of this forum: the 2.6 build mechanism is principly the same regardless of release number.

If that doesn't work I wrote one for someone else a while back: http://www.kaear.co.uk/default.asp?pageID=36

Also googling is a great resource.

If you *still* have problems, give me an email and we'll make some custom instructions just for you! I would say that by applying a modicum of intellect, the challenge of compiling & installing a new kernel becomes very very simple. The only real trick that I didn't find out about until very recently is copying your old .config file into a new kernel source tree and running "make oldconfig" on the new tree to give you an updated kernel config without loosing all the settings on your current kernel.

Of course, if you're still using a stock 9.1 kernel, "make oldconfig" isn't going to be much use!

A note or two (from experience, not necessarily totally correct):

* You can only have one full kernel installed at any one time. Although you can have multiple entries in lilo for multiple versions of kernel, the installed modules are only for the last kernel you ran "make modules_install" on.
* Nothing on your system is changed until you run "make install" and "make modules_install". I advise running them both (assuming a successful build) or NEITHER. Don't do any half measures.

Anyway, do some reading & research, and see if you can't pick up the process =) If you don't understand much of what I've said, then read some more and re-read what I've mentioned above - it should all come about quickly!

- Piete.

wierd... Angelfire yanked my web page for using it as a "free file server" but now it's mysteriously up again... Grab it while you can....

http://www.angelfire.com/linux/madpenguin1/nvidia.htm

I also had no joy on the new kernel. I wasn't getting the "invalid module format" anymore or the "/usr/lib/libGL.so is not an ELF file - it has the wrong magic bytes at the start" stuff when I'd run ldconfig... Seems the newer kernel did something but it didn't fix my problem. I get a hard lock whenever I start X. All black screen. The drivers at that link are the only ones that will fix that issue..... Oh well... Good luck tho. I'm burned out on it.

ok.. i installed the drivers from your site... and it works.. I get the nvidia splash screen etc.. however, occasionally everything locks up and I have to hard reset.. I can still move the mouse but the keyboard and comp are unresponsive..

It never happened before.. and there doesn't seem to be any one thing that I do to make it happen.. it is fairly random.. sometimes takes an hour.. other times a few min.. I checked syslog to see if I could find what happened but there is nothing there.. I guess it locks up and can't write the error.. any suggestions??

btw.. what I tried so far
1. lowering the refresh rates for the monitor..
2. Commenting out the 'amount of ram'
3. reinstalling the drivers
4. Double and triple checked the xorg.conf.. got everthing right in there.. loading glx but not dri or glcore etc.

any further help would be appreciated.. i am writing this using the nv driver again :(

Sorry to highjack the thread here. Still let us know if the new kernel worked out for you.

Interesting... Never heard of that. I ran that driver on 2.6.10 for a few weeks with no problem. Of course, this is on LFS not Slack. Still, it seems unlikely that its an OS specific problem. I've run those drivers on Slack for years with no problems (not kernel 2.6.x tho).

Now, I didn't patch that "2.6.9 and above" driver for the VMALLOC issue. Just changed the pci_find_class function to pci_get_class.... The only thing I can think of off hand is to patch it further. I ran without the vmalloc addition for a week with no probs and decided it just didn't affect me. I really don't know... You might try this:



I just found a patch that may address my problem while hunting for you... I'm off to try it. Thats a patch by the way. Save it in a text file as blah.diff, drop it in your source and "patch -Np1 -i blah.diff" just incase you didnt know. Then reinstall the driver. I don't see how thats going to fix anything but you never know..

EDIT - That patch above has already been applied to the driver. I also ditched the .tar.bz2 in favor of the native .run format. Just run it like you would any other nvidia driver.

ok.. I patched it and reinstalled.. I am writing this post using the nvidia driver.. so far so good :P I will post back if I get any lock ups..

thanks for all your help.. hopefully the problem is solved *crosses fingers*

Well, my 5000th atempt yielded nothing. par for the course. I'm rooting for you tho...

well.. hasn't locked up all night ... and i have been trying to make it happen... opening up lots of programs etc.. all good for now.. thx again for the help

Nice... Make sure you let me know if it freezes again. If I don't hear back from you, I'll apply that patch and upload the new tarball. I suppose it wouldn't hurt anyway...