nvidia trouble and breaking in a supposedly LTS release

[Gene Heskett]

On Monday 17 May 2010, William Hamra wrote:
>so after my fresh installation of lucid last week, everything was
>working like a charm, i had nvidia-current installed, compositing
>working great, i still am pissed i cant install manually from nvidia's
>website, but that's fine, as long as ubuntu keep up with the drivers and
>provide the latest driver. so far so good, except for the nagging popup
>that i have some updates, which i was delaying since i had better uses
>for the bandwidth, mainly setting up all my *important* programs, from
>firefox, to flash, java, thunderbird, vlc, various codecs and amsn.
>24 hours ago, i decided to update. 100+ megabytes of data got
>downloaded, and few hours later, the installation started, it included a
>new kernel, and new nvidia drivers, all went fine. all until reboot.
>no X, no nvidia modules loaded, no nothing. over the past 16 hours(yes,
>i haven't slept yet in over 35 hours), i have been trying to fix this,
>with a combination of dropping to root shells using recovery option,
>using alternate CD to get a chrooted root shell, and normal booting. i
>assumed it was the kernel causing this, doing an lsmod showed that
>ati_agp was loaded as agp_gart, which was just wrong, my motherboard
>chipset and internal VGA is ATI, but that's disabled since i have a
>nvidia geforce 8500 installed and plugged to screen. nvidia's drivers
>still aren't working, and even worse, if a xorg.conf configured for
>nvidia exists, or there's no xorg.conf at all, the screen goes off as
>soon as kdm starts, which means i have to blindly go to TTY1, and hit
>ctrl-alt-del to reboot, and use the alternate CD, because even the
>recovery option would give the same result, which makes no sense, it's
>text-mode, why would it do that? i suspect it has to do something with
>plymouth, but i cant be fessed to mess with that now.
>eventually, i started checking aptitude changelog for all packages i
>suspect to have problems, i notice alberto milano patched something in
>nvidia that deals with the auto-configuration and selection of a VGA,
>and realized that could be it. i have no idea why he is doing this now,
>but i find his past work, namely the Envy driver installer far better
>and stable than his new work for jockey, he could have delayed that to
>10.10, but no, knowing canonical and ubuntu too well now, they barely
>care about stability anymore. i dont believe for one, that they dont
>have a nvidia machine to test on, this is an LTS release, how can they
>approve such an update AFTER the system was released??
>i rolled back to the previous nvidia-current package, for some reason,
>dkms isnot configuring it for the new kernel, but that's fine, i am
>using the old one now, waiting for some new updates, hopefully sometime
>this year....
>sorry for the rant, but this is really unacceptable for a *stable* release.

I would like to offer a counter rant here Willy.  Installing any card makers 
binary blob, particularly the nvidia one which has a record of causing nearly 
80% of the BSOD's on windows, into an LTS system is equivalent to Daniels 
being thrown in the lions den.  Only if you were Daniel, would that be 
construed as safe.  Since neither of us is Daniel, well...

There are instances where a well working system really doesn't work so well, 
even if it is stable.  I have about half ati & half nvidia cards in my 
various boxes, and in order for one of them to actually do its job, which is 
running a pile of stepper motors attached to my milling machine, and steppers 
need the steadiest heartbeat to run at anywhere near their maximum speed.  I 
was having stalls and lockups at any attempted speed about about 2"/minute 
moves, but nuking all the nvidia stuff and going back to the nv driver 
allowed me to run at around 11"/minute.  But the mind blower was that when I 
switched it to the vesa driver, I could reliably move at over 34 IPM.  It 
turns out the nv driver ran 'better', only by hogging the interrupts, which 
the vesa driver apparently does not.  And the nvidia driver, by later 
testing, turned out to be locking out the IRQ's for large fractions of a 
second, and you cannot expect a stepper turning 400 rpm, to stop in its 
tracks, and restart back at full speed without a decel/accel ramp so the 
motor stays locked to the steps.

Good figures from glxgears is nice for bragging rights, but the real question 
is, will it do the job?  For this particular job, only the vesa driver works 
well.  And should I have a problem, dmesg doesn't bitch that my kernel is 
tainted.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
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