Could this be a software problem or a hardware issue ?

[Polytropon]

On Wed, 2 Nov 2016 12:20:33 +0000, Manish Jain wrote:
> XP is working very nicely.

"Windows" works nicely even with defective hardware, it's just
that you don't notice it in the first place. ;-)



> But FreeBSD is giving me a syndrome : If I 
> set the X driver to vesa, I get normal X display (with no drm, of 
> course). But if set the X driver to nvidia (which should be the correct 
> default for my NVidia GT 710 card), I get a strange screen with 'startx' 
> : mostly black with patches of colours spread across the screen. 

This somehow looks like "garbage in the graphics memory".
A card named "GT 710" is not listed in the compatibility list
at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics - can you provide the
complete name (from "pciconf -lv" and "dmesg" output) as
well as possible detection messages from /var/log/Xorg.0.log
(X log file)?

The name "GT 710" seems to refer to an NVidia GeForce card:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics#NVidia_.2F_GeForce_Graphics

It's missing from that list.



> Rebooting with the driver reset to vesa solves the problem.

You could try one of the two alternate nVidia drivers which
can be installed, and then loaded via xorg.conf: "nouveau"
and "nv". Both don't provide any great 3D support (compared
to the proprietary "nvidia" driver), but they might be worth
a try.



> Further (with the X driver set to nvidia), I spotted that my ttyv0 gets 
> filled up with :
> 
> ata0: FAILURE - odd-sized DMA transfer attempt 5 % 2
> ata0: setting up DMA failed
> 
> There are 3 components that I suspect could be the root of my problem[s] :
> 
> 1) the motherboard (Gigabyte GA970)
> 2) RAM (Kingston DDR3 8 GB x 1, 1600 MHz)
> 3) the graphics card (NVidia  2 GB, GT 710)
> 
> All of the above are just 2-3 months old, the RAM probably the newest.

If the errors only appear when the nvidia driver is being used,
a kind of "DMA conflict" affecting the ata controller (where the
mass storage and optical drives are being accessed with) could
be possible. The driver uses the DRM / DRI facilities to perform
direct memory access, the storage controllers do the same.



An older web forum thread mentions HAL being the source of a
similar problem. Do you have HAL (hald) running? (Anyway, it
should be up to date if installed, and it's deprecated for a
long time in the Linux world already.)

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/44604/



-- 
Polytropon
Magdeburg, Germany
Happy FreeBSD user since 4.0
Andra moi ennepe, Mousa, ...