3.0 Beta - finally success - sort of.

  • sydb
Posted: Mon, 04/20/2009 - 20:11
Hey, Finally some success for me with the 3.0 beta. But new problems. After getting linux-kbuild backported I managed to build the nvidia drivers for my GeForce 7600 GS but still I got a freeze on X startup. I tried adding the various boot parameters noapic acpi=off etc with no success. I was ready to ditch my nvidia card for an ATI. But I thought I'd give it one more go. So I was looking in my motherboard's BIOS settings (I have a Tyan s2895) and found an option to switch from APIC to PIC. I selected PIC and my machine has booted right into X. A joyous occasion! However now I find every so often my CPU gets maxed out by IRQ-5. I have four Opteron cores yet it grinds my machine to a halt for about 30 seconds. 
mpacey@64studio:~$ cat /proc/interrupts 
           CPU0       
  0:        176    XT-PIC-XT        timer
  1:          2    XT-PIC-XT        i8042
  2:          0    XT-PIC-XT        cascade
  4:          2    XT-PIC-XT      
  5:   59567784    XT-PIC-XT        nvidia
  7:      17185    XT-PIC-XT        ehci_hcd:usb2
  8:          0    XT-PIC-XT        rtc0
  9:          0    XT-PIC-XT        acpi
Any ideas how to fix this? That aside, I can now get on with playing with the lovely new Ubuntu-based 64 Studio. Hurray! Also this forum is finally playing nice for me in Firefox 3.0. Cheers Michael
‹ 64studio 2.1 install Revision Building Jack 0.116 on 64 Studio 2.1 ›

Update

  • sydb
  • 06/05/07
  • Sat, 04/25/2009 - 15:18
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In the interests of keeping relevant information together, here's an update. I rebuilt my 3.0 beta installation as planned but now I'm unable to build the nVidia driver as linux-headers-xxxx-common is not available in the 64Studio repository, and it's a dependency for the linux-headers. The good news is the nv driiver is now working for me (it was not previously). Michael Pacey

Hi Quentin, That's the

  • sydb
  • 06/05/07
  • Tue, 04/21/2009 - 07:49
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Hi Quentin, That's the thing, my card IS listed as supported on the nVidia website and my very expensive machine was bought from a specialist Linux system integrator with the card, but I've always had problems with the nVidia card and 64 Studio kernels (3 years now!). I'll try the rebuild and post the results. Cheers Michael Pacey

Hi Michael

  • Quentin Harley
  • 05/24/07
  • Tue, 04/21/2009 - 05:22
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Sorry, I was sleeping and did not see your cries for help. It is a real pity that the world is round, otherwise it would improve communication quite a bit... Good idea about the reinstall. I had to do it myself after testing so many backported packages. Not all packages are ready or stable enough for backport just yet. Good suggestions for video cards would be the cards on the nvidia website listed as supported on the linux drivers. I have an old GeForce 6200 that is fanless, but has enough performance to make my multimedia desktop experience flawless. 3D good enough to be able to run compiz and still have a usable system. After the redo, let us know how it went. Cheers, Quentin

Back to 2.1 for me...

  • sydb
  • 06/05/07
  • Mon, 04/20/2009 - 23:46
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I have found I can reliably get into X without the interrupt processor hog and with APIC enabled in my bios by setting the nolapic boot flag. Works fine, except still only one of my four cores is enabled. My next step is to get a new video card. Does anyone have any suggestions for a card which will work with an S2895 motherboard and the 64 Studio kernel? I'd like 3D but it's not critical. I have an old 16MB 3DFX Voodoo 3 card somewhere, maybe I should go back to that! Edit: I see there's a more recent NVidia driver (180.51) than the one I'm using which fixes various bugs some of which are amd64 related. So I'll put the tdfx card back on ice and try the new one. But I'm going to have to do a reinstall of the beta first as I think I've screwed up my system by trying to install legacy drivers and now I can't get the latest nvidia driver installed properly,... Michael Pacey

[ 0.000000] ACPI: No

  • sydb
  • 06/05/07
  • Mon, 04/20/2009 - 20:57
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[    0.000000] ACPI: No APIC-table, disabling MPS
[    0.000000] SMP: Allowing 1 CPUs, 0 hotplug CPUs
meh 
mpacey@64studio:~$ grep processor /proc/cpuinfo 
processor	: 0
mpacey@64studio:~$
That used to go all the way up to 3 :( Michael Pacey

So I spoke to soon about the

  • sydb
  • 06/05/07
  • Mon, 04/20/2009 - 20:27
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So I spoke to soon about the forum working for me... -- Michael Pacey

From dmesg: [ 2312.048667]

  • sydb
  • 06/05/07
  • Mon, 04/20/2009 - 20:28
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From dmesg: 
[ 2312.048667] irq 5: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option)
[ 2312.048673] Pid: 4364, comm: IRQ-5 Tainted: P           2.6.29-1-multimedia-amd64 #1
[ 2312.048675] Call Trace:
[ 2312.048974]  [] ? nv_kern_isr+0x22/0x54 [nvidia]
[ 2312.048979]  [] ? __report_bad_irq+0x30/0x7d
[ 2312.048982]  [] ? note_interrupt+0x24d/0x288
[ 2312.048985]  [] ? handle_IRQ_event+0x55/0xee
[ 2312.048987]  [] ? thread_simple_irq+0x63/0x79
[ 2312.048990]  [] ? do_irqd+0xe6/0x2d6
[ 2312.048992]  [] ? do_irqd+0x0/0x2d6
[ 2312.048996]  [] ? kthread+0x47/0x73
[ 2312.048999]  [] ? child_rip+0xa/0x20
[ 2312.049001]  [] ? kthread+0x0/0x73
[ 2312.049001]  [] ? child_rip+0x0/0x20
[ 2312.049001] handlers:
[ 2312.049001] [] (nv_kern_isr+0x0/0x54 [nvidia])
I'll try the irqpoll option, but I read it gives a performance hit. -- Michael Pacey