That's the last time I fiddle around with the 2.6 kernel...

[Seph64]

...well until it gets out of the beta stage.

I was trying to get the framebuffer to work with the 2.6.0-test 9 kernel, I attempted to boot into the kernel, whoa it works... Wait, nope, blank screen (after seeing text scrolling down), I reboot and get greeted with *beep* *beep* *beep*

I thought, oh crap the video card died. I take out my GeForce 4 Ti4400 and insert my GeForce 2 MX 400 card, and the computer works. Now I just ordered a new Video Card (ATI Radeon 9500), should arrive within the next few days.

I do not know if it was trying to get the Framebuffer to work that screwed my GeForce 4 card up or it was something else.

How is the I2C support in 2.6? Anyone have any problems with getting hardware to work with it enabled ion the 2.6 kernel?

Any how, did anyone else here get one of their pieces of hardware broken when they were trying new things with a beta kernel?

[bwkaz]

<long story>

I thought that my entire system was broken by the kernel's ACPI support the other day. Turns out it was just one of my own screwups...

I've been trying to get 2.6.0-test9 to boot for a couple of days now. The first problem was that since devfs was deprecated, I didn't build it into the kernel -- and didn't have any normal fallback device nodes either. Which is a problem, since once devfs is mounted, you can't write to the underlying filesystem anymore. And you can't unmount devfs, because the console you're working on is holding /dev/vc/X open (where X depends on the virtual console number).

So I installed (LFS) again on a spare partition, booted to that, created the device nodes, and booted back to my old partition with the new kernel.

I then found a bunch of problems in my boot scripts (I had written them to be extremely 2.4-specific, plus I wasn't bringing up hotplug, and a bunch of other stuff). On one of the reboots to see whether everything was working properly, my machine failed to come back on. The front-panel LEDs were both on, but the fans never spun up.

I thought "what the heck, it's probably just a slight bit overheated or something". So I looked at the CPU fan. Its fins were covered in dust, so I unplugged the box and took the actual fan off the heatsink (which required me to unplug it from the motherboard). After cleaning the dust, I put the fan back on, and neglected to hook up the power connector. Uh, oops.

So I booted a few more times, and it worked for about 20 minutes. But after one particular reboot, the system just sort of hung in a state where the power LED was on, but the hard drive LED was off. Again, "what the heck? Is ACPI doing this crap?" -- I had heard that ACPI was used a lot more to bring the system up; I thought maybe the same was true bringing it down. I noticed that the longer I left the machine off, though, the longer it stayed on -- but in the end, it always just shut the CPU power off and went into a state where the power LED was on but nothing else.

So after a bit of swearing at the stupid thing, I realized that it might be due to heat. Hmm... when I cleaned that fan ... *ding ding ding* light goes on. Plug the fan in, and everything worked. ;)

</long story>

The framebuffer works for me. I've got a GF4 Ti4200, and I use the vesafb driver (NOT the rivafb one! ;)).

What doesn't work is X -- even with the patch from www.minion.de, the nVidia code manages to sleep with locks held when shutting X down (which causes lots of nice syslog messages...), and anything requiring 3D also fails pretty miserably (basically with a bunch of kernel errors about "don't ever call pci_find_slot from within an interrupt handler"). Hangs the kernel, too -- at least, ctrl-alt-f2 doesn't work.

I don't think magic sysrq is an option anymore (though I'll have to double check that), but in any case, it didn't do anything either. Though syslog did seem to, interestingly enough...

[Seph64]

I always had trouble with patches from minion.de as well. Since I am running Gentoo, I thought I'd give emerge nvidia-kernel a shot. It works, it gives me a usable, and stable nvidia kernel module for the 2.6 kernel.

Man wouldn't it suck if I discovered that my GeForce 4 Ti4400 still worked? And it was too late to cancel my order for the ATI Radeon 9500 I purchased.

Well, at least I'd have something to give my brother for Christmas. ;)

Speaking of ATI, how are their Linux drivers, do they give good 3D performance in Linux?

[bwkaz]

I have no idea; I've avoided ATI like the plague after getting a Radeon 7500 (LE, but still) a couple years ago, and seeing that it ran Quake 2 at about the same speed as my ancient (at the time; more so now) Voodoo3. It was about half the speed of the GF2 that I was replacing.

*shrug*

Do you have to be running Gentoo to get access to that portage package? Or is there some other way I can get their version of the drivers?

Maybe I just ought to wait until kernel 2.6.0 is released, when nVidia gets off their behinds and puts out a real, supported driver... nah, that'd be too easy. :p

[bandwidth_pig]

I was able to get 2.6.0 test 1 to boot. Although, interestingly it didn't load my modules even though I enabled the module loader in the kernel. I didn't see any huge performance difference in the short time I was playing around in it though. Since I don't have any bleeding edge hardware, I think I'll just stick with the 2.4 series until I have a real reason to switch.

[Seph64]

Originally posted by bwkaz
I have no idea; I've avoided ATI like the plague after getting a Radeon 7500 (LE, but still) a couple years ago, and seeing that it ran Quake 2 at about the same speed as my ancient (at the time; more so now) Voodoo3. It was about half the speed of the GF2 that I was replacing.

*shrug*

Do you have to be running Gentoo to get access to that portage package? Or is there some other way I can get their version of the drivers?

Maybe I just ought to wait until kernel 2.6.0 is released, when nVidia gets off their behinds and puts out a real, supported driver... nah, that'd be too easy. :p

It is possible to install Portage on any distro, but then the DB of software you had installed would get tossed aside and you'd have to compile most of everything.

[bwkaz]

I compile everything anyway (LFS).

But I do like my package "management" (basically, install each package as a separate user; that way you can tell what package any file came from with an ls -l, and a find / -user <packagename> -exec rm {} \; will remove any package unless it has created directories).

Is there a way to get at the portage tree without having portage installed? Maybe a web interface somewhere? I probably ought to just go look at Gentoo's site...