nvidia/4.8-stable

[Mike Porter]

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On Saturday 07 June 2003 07:22 pm, darren wrote:
> Has anyone had the nvidia driver successfully work for them?  I ended up
> crashing everytime I tried to use X.  All I'm interested in is the use of
> my tv-out on my nvidia card.  any input is appreciated
>
> -Darren

Mine doesn't have TV out, but it works great, and a noticiable spped 
difference in X compared to the 'nv' driver.

A couple of tricky things though (they ARE covered in the installation stuff)
1) you need to put agp.ko in /boot/loader.conf 
(agp_load="YES")  The agp driver apparently can only fully load properly at 
boot. (although I was able to make it work by manuallying loading agp.ko 
after boot.  It is a pain to have to do so, however)

2) you need to load the linux.ko module as well, and BEFORE the nvidia driver.  
To make this work, I added linux.ko and linprocfs.ko to /boot/loader.conf as 
well. 
(linprocfs_load="YES"
linux_load="YES")
The linprocfs is not strictly necessary, but I need it anyway for StarOffice, 
so I added them both at the same time.  Linux is necessary for the nvidia.ko 
to load (or for the nvidia driver, the documentation isn't clear on this 
point.  To be safe, I just put them all in my loader.conf)

3) you need to load the nvidia.ko object.  Since I load X at startup, this 
also has to happen either in loader.conf, or in the rc scripts before 
launching x.  it seemed easier to me to just add it to loader.conf, 
especially since I was playing there anyway.
(nvidia.load="YES")
The caveat here, of course, is that you have to move nvidia.ko into your 
/modules directory.  Also, it has been reported here and on the -current 
mailing list that if you recompile your kernel, nvidia.ko is *NOT* recompiled 
by the buildworld process (its a port) and this means that you need to 
rebuild the port  manually for builworld, and copy the .ko file manually 
during installworld (unless you want to patch the buildworld and installworld 
targets <(}:.).  Note also that NOT putting the .ko file in /modules does not 
absolve you of the recompile part.

Once those three prerequisites are taken care of (either preloading the 
necessary modules in loader.conf or manually loading with kldload, you should 
be able to start X without a hitch.  You might find that you have to tweak 
the sysctls for nvidia.ko to get the behavior you expect (i did not find that 
necessary, but, of course, YMMV).  Any sysctl tweaks should be done *before* 
loading X, according to the docs.

Oh yeah, one other thing, I have NOT been able to get it to run properly in 
OpenGL mode.  I haven't tried that hard, yet, as it works "good enough" for 
now.

mike
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