nvidia performace
 

when I first installed the nvidia drivers on my redhat 8 system

athlon xp 1900+
512 DDR
120 GB IBM
KG7-lite
Geforce 4 Ti4200

I was getting around 6000 on glxgears

then used up2date to update my kernel from 2.4.14-8.0 to 2.4.18-8.0 it went flawless so I rebooted into the new kernel and tried glx gears and now I'm getting around 3000 in glxgears.. thats a huge performance hit. I'm just wondering if there is something I can do fix this. or is glx gears not really that accurate and not to worry about?

thanks again

I don't know whether the up2date thing updates your NVidia drivers or not... if not, then head over to nvidia's site and download the lates in .tar.gz format and follow the instructions to the letter in the README file that's also available from that site. I stress getting the .tar.gz files because you're now running a non-stock kernel, so you'll have less hassle using these than if you go for the .rpm files!

Good luck.

Hmm...I really think that automatically updating kernel is bit stupid.

Re: nvidia performace
 

Generally you should recompile your video driver after you do the kernel.

well after it updated my kernel I erased my rpm's(rpm -e NVIDIA_GLX and NVIDIA_kernel) which I had installed at the time.
I restarted my system and booted into the new kernel. I recompiled my srpm's and installed them I got 3000 on glxgears. I figured it could be the rpms so I installed the drivers from the source. I still am getting 3000fps.
I heard that redhat 8.0 kernel has some performace flaws so I tried to install 2.4.19 from the source from kernel.org. I failed to configure it right tho because it couldn't mount the files system because it said that it didnt have the ext3 driver. which is odd because I put that in the configuration. obviously I missed something.
Well now I'm just wondering how do I export my current kernel configuration I can just upgrade to the newer kernel?

When you say that you put it in the configuration, did you have it as part of the kernel or as a loadable module? If the latter, did you make modules && make modules_install before rebooting to test your kernel?

I did make modules and make modules_install before I installed the kerenel. I also didn't put file system support in as a module I just included it in the kenerel.

Sorry? You did those before you installed the kernel? What do you mean by that? Before you added your new kernel to your lilo/grub file?

ok heres exactly what I did

# make xconfig
# make modules
# make install_modules
# make install

I followed a nice guide from http://www.freeos.com/articles/3579/ which shows how to up the kerenel to 2.4.x

I know how to install a kernel, my problem is I think I goofed up my configuration somewhere in xconfig and thats the problem. Where can I get the config file from my current kerenel to import into xconfig?

Thanks for all the help

You did actually do a

make bzImage

at some point to build the kernel itself, didn't you? (I'm a bit hazy on linux kernel building - long time, no do - but I'm pretty sure there should be a make dep and a make bzImage in there somewhere)

Alex

yeah I made a bzImage...

I'm currently recompilign the kernel because I found a configuration file in /boot of my older kenerel

I just imported it and saved then I typed

make dep clean modules modules_install bzImage install

hopefully this works.

I do have a question tho. If I installed the nvidia drivers from the source. do I have to reinstall them? If I do then where do I uninstall the drivers from?

after some time of running I got this. I'm guessing its from make modules or modules_install but im not sure.

sim710.c: In function `sim710_detect':
sim710.c:1580: `Ent_test1' undeclared (first use in this function)
sim710.c:1613: `A_int_test1' undeclared (first use in this function)
make[2]: *** [sim710.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.19/drivers/scsi'
make[1]: *** [_modsubdir_scsi] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.19/drivers'
make: *** [_mod_drivers] Error 2

anyone got an Idea? also do I really need scsi support? I don't have scsi but I heard you need it for cdrom writers. sounded a little odd to me when I heard that.

Yeah, I'd say it looks like you need scsi support.

But before you do that, try building the kernel without modules. That way the dependency tree in the script will make sure you don't check "enable ide-scsi emulation" as a module when you don't have "scsi support" enabled in your kernel (or some other dependency trap). When you've got a kernel which boots and behaves as you want, then copy the bzImage over and reboot.

this time I ran make dep clean bzImage
and I got another error

/usr/src/linux-2.4.19/include/linux/modules/i386_ksyms.ver:96:1: warning: this is the location of the previous definition
make[2]: *** [ksyms.o] Error 1
make[2]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.19/kernel'
make[1]: *** [first_rule] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-2.4.19/kernel'
make: *** [_dir_kernel] Error 2

I really don't think that redhat is worth this. I hear so many problems with this distro but I can't get mandrake 9.0 to install the nvidia glx drivers right, maybe I might try it again.

I really wanted to get debain workign on my system but its harder to setup for some as unexperianced as me. are there any other distros that I really should look into that are somewhat easy to install?