Re: recent nvidia-driver trouble

On Fri, 15 Jun 2007 15:01:07 -0400
Craig Rodrigues <rodrigc_at_crodrigues.org> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 15, 2007 at 08:31:36PM +0200, Gary Jennejohn wrote:
> > I've seen this also. It's a panic due to a NULL-pointer dereference
> > someplace in the nvidia-driver. I suspect that it's related to the
> > recent locking/mutex/whatever changes but can't prove it. All the
> > crash dumps which I have are corrupted so I can't do a backtrace :-(
> > 
> > The bug seems to be in the binary blob part of the driver, which
> > means we have to wait for Nvidia to get around to fixing it.
> 
> Have you reported this problem to Nvidia?  They don't regularly
> monitor FreeBSD mailing lists, but I've found that they
> are fairly responsive to e-mails sent to:
> freebsd-gfx-bugs_at_nvidia.com 
> 

I thought about it but haven't done anything yet. I don't feel that I
really have enough information for a meaningful bug report because I
can't analyze any crash dumps. Maybe that wouldn't matter to Nvidia.

My suspicion about the binary blob is based on the panic output, which
points at a macro which examines td_refcnt. I find it hard to believe
that the pointer to the thread is NULL when this macro is used. That's
why I suspect that the real culprit is someplace in the locking used
by Nvidia, but without a usable crash dump it's hard to verify.

--- 
Gary Jennejohn / garyjATjennejohnDOTorg gjATfreebsdDOTorg
garyjATdenxDOTde