Before I continue writing this post, I have to admit that I really love the binary NVIDIA drivers, and they’re rock solid when playing any OpenGL accelerated game (including UT2K3), and I’m very thankful to the NVIDIA guys for making these drivers available.
(otherwise I would have to buy a Matrox card without all of those nice GL extensions )
Anyway, altough everything seems to be very stable, I do have a large problem with these drivers; some (GL-only-)programs crash/reset my X server.
I’m already having this problem for 4 months now and I’m really getting sick of it.
Not only because this bug is very irritating, but it’s also VERY hard to debug because of the crashing X server.
And it’s even more difficult to develop software when X crashes everytime I do a testrun.
I’ve tried many solutions from many websites, including changing all of the environment variables to every possible value and every possible combination and the same for options in my XF86Config.
statistics:
[li]All programs that use the wxGLCanvas from wxGTK ( wxWindows ) crash my X server.[]Some programs that use gtkglext (GL widget for Gtk2) also crash X.[]The NeHe GLX tutorials don’t crash.[*]Humus’ demos also don’t crash.
What I currently know:
[li]When I comment out calls to glXSwapBuffers() X doesn’t crash[]From gtkglext, only the pixmap- demos crash… I’ve noticed that this demo does not crash when commenting out the displist calls (drawing without displists does also make X crash)[]16 bpp, 32 bpp… it doesn’t matter (neither for screendepth and/or visuals, altough I do know that wrong visuals make most GL programs quit with a segfault)[]These crashes don’t exist when using the open source ‘nv’ driver (but I’m not going to use that one because it’s too slow)
My system specs:
[ul][li]Red Hat 8.0[]Kernel 2.4 and 2.5 (crashes on both)[]RH8 XFree 4.2.0[]AGPGART does not get loaded because my dumb Via chipset is not supported (neither by nvAGP)[]To be sure that it’s not an APG bug (on my side at least), I’ve disabled support for both AGPGART and nvAGP in my XF86Config[]GeForce3 Ti 200[]Latest Linux Detonator Driver (not 40.xx)[*]Chipset: VIA Pro Savage PM133, this chipset has already caused a lot of problems for me when I was using Win2K.[/li]Every Direct3D program crashed with it.
The crashes went away when I started using WinXP (with better support for Via chipsets I believe, the win2k Via AGP driver was flaky (including the 4-in-1 drivers))[/ul]
I really hope someone knows more about this, because it’s making me really mad…
I’m also not going to buy another mainboard or videocard, it should work the way it is.
[This message has been edited by richardve (edited 12-07-2002).]
[This message has been edited by richardve (edited 12-07-2002).]
In this pixbuf demo (gtkglext) I was talking about, I just noticed that it is trying to render to an offscreen pixmap.
That doesn’t sound all that good to me, I thought one would need the pbuffer extension to render to offscreen buffers?
(gtkglext doesn’t use any extension as far as I can see)
Hm… this could explain the crash when starting to render things (even a simple GL_POINT crashes X)
[This message has been edited by richardve (edited 12-07-2002).]
To use a generic VIA AGP driver, go to your kernel’s source tree, and find the file drivers/char/agp/agpgart_be.c; you want to set agp_try_unsupported to 1 and rebuild your kernel (or the module, however it is on your system)… that should get you AGP support.
btw. it doesn’t make my system more or less stable though.
Rendering to offscreen pixmaps (without using any extensions) is still impossible to do without making X crash/reset.
