Re: NVidia driver stability?

> 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.


Back when I used the first nvidia driver with my old Geforce 3 TI 200, I
didn't see anything like this, occasionally a FreeBSD app would cause a
crash, but as long as I set the environment variable that kept things
single threaded, I had no problems. This could be your problem:

>From the README on nvidia's driver page for FreeBSD:

The NVIDIA FreeBSD Accelerated Driver Set is fully thread-safe if native,
multi-threaded applications are developed using the FreeBSD linux-threads
port.  If the above mentioned linux_sysvec.c.diff patch is applied,
then the Linux ABI compatibility libraries are also fully thread-safe.

The native NVIDIA FreeBSD OpenGL driver does not currently interact well
with the libc_r, libkse, or libthr thread libraries.  Until these issues
are resolved, it is recommended that you use the FreeBSD linux-threads
port for multithreaded OpenGL applications.

I've seen problems on my friends machine until we compiled native GL apps
to use linuxthreads, and set the appropriate environment variables before
running any linux games.

Ken