nvidia trouble and breaking in a supposedly LTS release

Mon May 17 21:00:02 UTC 2010

On 05/17/2010 09:51 PM, Mark Greenwood wrote:
> On Monday 17 May 2010 16:54:14 Gene Heskett wrote:
>> 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.
>>
>>
> 
> OTOH I will only use nvidia graphics cards in my machines because the binary driver works exceptionally well. I have a fanless 8600GT card which overheats in 30 minutes if used with the nv driver. I have no objections to using nvidia's binary blob, as it provides the graphics performance for which I bought the card as well as the thermal control it needs. I run hard-realtime AV processing, with 2ms audio latency and the bottleneck is not the nvidia driver but the Ubuntu kernel - for which reason I always build my own kernels these days; the nvidia driver does not affect what I do one tiny bit. 
> 
> If you're having problems with drivers hogging interrupts this is more likely to be poor motherboard design or a low quality IO chipset (VIA, are you listening?). Indeed if your system has any components made by VIA inside it I would recommend its use as either a doorstop or as filling for your rubbish bin. 
> 
> Mark
> 

i bought a nvidia card so i can *use* the features it has, otherwise, i
would have bought some cheap 20$ card that i am sure can be configured
by the flick of a finger, or hell, even stayed on the internal ATI chip
and saved a lot of money. but i like nvidia, yes i do, very much. yes
they provide *proprietary* drivers only, but they do their job quite
well, when KDE4 was released, they sucked, few complaints, and they
improved the drivers. and i would most certainly want to be able to
*use* them. i like compositing, and i play some games using wine on my
spare time. nv and nouveau are not bad, but they just dont cut it, i get
a lot of graphical glitches on the screen, gnome seems to work a lot
better with them.

thanks for the tip Mark, i am amazed the kernel headers aren't
installed. something should depend on them. either nvidia-current, or i
think better would be dkms... still haven't figured if that was a main
cause of the problem, but i'll check after rebooting, at least now i
know how to fix it, if the problem re-occurred :)

-- 
Willy K. Hamra
Manager of Hamra Information Systems
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: w_hamra1987.vcf
Type: text/x-vcard
Size: 134 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-users/attachments/20100518/293aba9e/attachment.vcf>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 262 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/kubuntu-users/attachments/20100518/293aba9e/attachment.sig>