[wplug-bsd] FreeBSD 5.1-CURRENT + nVidia driver problem

[Bill Moran]

Benjamin Slavin wrote:
> Well, I first tried 4.9-RELEASE on my laptop and was even more impressed 
> than I expected to be. I decided it was time for my desktop, so I 
> loaded-up 5.1-RELEASE and tinkered around a bit. I realized that I might 
> need to be running -CURRENT if I wished to install many of the ports, so 
> I did.

Yikes!

Very few ports will require -CURRENT.  And, frankly, -CURRENT is in a
rather bad place right now.  There has been a lot of shake-up development
done, and it's not a good time to be trying out -CURRENT unless you're
going to be actively involved in stabilizing the new features.

> I was graced with a broken SCSI driver (system failed to boot 
> into anything by safemode, so I gave up on them and started to use my 
> cheap IDE disks), and a graphics driver which no longer worked.
> (I mention all this incase anyone might have a suggestion as to a common 
> mistake that I could have made in upgrading)
> 
> ----->>> The actual problem:
> I installed the nvidia driver from the ports collection, but it fails to 
> load. The screen merely goes to garbled text or a blank screen when 
> using the nVidia driver. CTRL+ALT+BACKSPACE has no affect in most cases 
> (when it does, it only goes back to a slow CLI with lots of "garbage" on 
> the screen). CTRK+ALT+DEL forces a reboot about 30 seconds after it is 
> pressed, and usually performs a proper reboot.

I believe (although I'm not positive) that there are known problems with
the nVidia driver in -CURRENT.

> I attempted building agp into the kernel and using a module (used with 
> WITH_FREEBSD_AGP) and had no success.
> I also had problems forcing the kernel to not load agp.ko (despite 
> recompilation, and not using WITH_FREEBSD_AGP, it wanted to load the agp 
> module).
> 
> It should be noted that the driver worked perfectly in 5.1-RELEASE. I'd 
> send a question in the direction of the official mailing lists, but 
> wanted to make sure that I wasn't missing something simple first.

Probably the fact that -CURRENT just isn't fit for consumption right now.
I lurk on the -CURRENT mailing list, and the last week or two have seen a
lot of new work imported.  Development is at a point where a bunch of new
features have been imported, and now the developers seem to be sorting
out all the conflicts this has caused.

Remember that -CURRENT is developed a lot more agressively than -STABLE,
it frequently has long periods of instability ... there's one of those
going on right now.

-- 
Bill Moran
Potential Technologies
http://www.potentialtech.com