Re: NVidia driver stability?

Thus spake Evan Dower (evantd_at_hotmail.com) [10/07/03 19:41]:
> The new nvidia-driver was unstable for me as well. So much so that I 
> deinstalled it so I could get some actual work done. I never was able o get 
> any specifics about it, as I don't have a serial console set up, and when 
> it crashes it freezes the screen. I can tell you this much though. 
> Sometimes when it locked up, I was able to ssh in from another machine, see 
> that XFree86 was taking 98-99% of CPU time, kill XFree86, and continue on. 
> Other times, I couldn't even ssh in, as the connection hung, so I had to do 
> a hard restart. The timing of these crashes was entirely unpredictable.
> I have a GeForce 3 Ti 200 and FreeBSD 5.1-RELENG. I tried with both AGP's. 
> Loading nvidia-driver into a debug kernel (INVARIANTS and WITNESS) still 
> causes an immediate panic. I don't know how the Nvidia people can do QA on 
> this without a debugging kernel. Just poorly I guess. I hope someone finds 
> this helpful though I would be shocked if it did. I would be happy 
> (ecstatic, actually) to run any experiments someone might be interested in.

I've been seeing this *exact* same behaviour on a Riva TNT2 for some time
now.  I find the new driver to be a /little/ more stable -- i.e. it's only
locked up once on me since I installed it on Monday, as opposed to locking
up three out of the four mornings for the previous driver.

I /do/ use FreeBSD's AGP driver, as I found that otherwise I just had
massive instability problems.