Gentoo agpgart issues
 

Hello everyone - I am in a Linux Networking and Security course at my local college, and for our semester project we must install Gentoo- a fellow student in the class is getting an error when attempting to run X - it says something to the effect of "agpgart -- device cannot be found". When trying to add this into the kernel, the option for AGPGart is dashed out. It won't let us build it into the OS and it won't let us use it as a module. We have tried it on the 2.6.9 kernel as well as the 2.6.10 kernel. If anyone has any recommendations, it would be appreciated.


Thanks,

Alandion

You may be missing support for a dependency of AGPGart. (AGP bus support, perhaps?)

any ideas where that would be in the kernel? its not in the same location as AGPGart- its not under bus devices, and it is not under Graphics....

Ok, so we got the AGPGart support added into the kernel, compiled the new kernel, rebooted, env-updated, and it still won't run X - He has KDE installed, he has X11-Xorg installed, here is the exact error it gives:
(EE) GARTInit: Unable to open /dev/agpgart (No such file or directory)

fatal server error:
failed to initialize core devices

Please consult blah blah blah for blah blah blah
or check the logfile at blah/blah/blah

We have checked the X11 Wiki site, not much help there
We have checked the logfile, but we don't know what information is relevant.

We now have the AGPGart support in the kernel, we copied over the new kernel image and all that Jazz....Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Alandion

I had this same problem. Check to see if /dev/agpgart exists, and if so, what the permissions on it are. Also, you did compile in support for the specific chipset and card, yes?

/dev/agpgart does not exist - in fact, when viewing the /dev directory on my machine, and comparing it to the contents of the /dev directory on his computer, we see a totally different list of devices, and the machines are similar, they are both microns with the exact same everything - purchased by the school for the purpose of learning linux. The drivers are installed in the kernel for the Intel 845g (i believe that is the right one) chipset as well, in fact, our kernels are configured identically.

Thanks for helping.

Well, then most likely, you guys are using differing /dev mechanisms. As I understand it, there are 3 mechanisms for the /dev system:

• Old-Style Nodes - Created using mknode, pretty much gone by now.
• DevFS - Pretty much went straight from experimental to deprecated, though I use it.
• uDev - considered the replacement for DevFS: very configurable.

The point is: you could have different systems there. Performing "mount" by itself should list whether or not there is anything mounted on "/dev" and what type it is.

i believe we are both using devfs, that is a kernel option, right? cause i remember seeing it in the kernel, and we both set ours up the same.

Check "mount": perhaps one of them is not actually running devfs. (Devfs may not be mounted). Also, you can check 'rc-update show' to see if it's scheduled to start.

Ok, we have support for devfs in the kernel. it does not show up in mount. we did a mount -t devfs none /dev and we got the error "not supported by kernel". We verified that this was in the kernel again, and it is....so its there, but its saying its not....Any other ideas? currently, we are going to try something along the lines of removing it from the kernel, compiling the new kernel, rebooting using the non-devfs-having kernel, recompile it again to include the devfs support, recompile, reboot. SAVE US!!!!

Alandion

All that recompiling should be unneccessary. Make sure "devfs mount at boot" is set to yes.