nvida Go 7300 working - WAS: Removal of XAA acceleration in X.org, and older NVIDIA GeForce

[Michael Jung]

On 2014-12-23 10:20, Mark Martinec wrote:
>> Tijl Coosemans wrote:
>>> This card is still supported by x11/nvidia-driver-304
> 
> Mark Martinec wrote:
>> Good suggestion! It does seem to draw screen and scroll
>> much faster than NV (although it seems to stall from time
>> to time (like unresponsive mouse) on a busy host).
>> Will need to test more thoroughly tomorrow when poudriere
>> builds will be over. Thanks!
> 
> Actually it did not turn out well. Although nvidia-driver-304 with
> a GeForce 7300 GT does not suffer from slow scrolls and slow rendering
> of web pages, it frequently stalls (like every minute) and nothing
> happens for a dozen of seconds: mouse cannot move a cursor, a cursor
> may even temporarily disappear, typing on an xterm or konsole window
> is unresponsive. It appears as if a host is terribly busy, even though
> it is not (the yesterday's poudriere build was over, and I even
> rebooted the host, with nvidia driver loaded by a boot loader
> this time).
> 
> After a dozen of seconds or so, things get back at being responsive
> again, until the next lockup. Occasionally a window may become
> scrambled, but rectifies itself after a while. After trying to
> work in this situation for a while, eventually screen turned black,
> with a host totally locked up - not even responding to ssh or ping
> or ctrl alt F1, or a soft ACPI power off button, so had to be
> forcibly rebooted.
> 
> So in the end I had to revert back to the NV driver, which is
> now slow, but at least is stable and consistent. I guess we need
> to start looking for a new graphics board, quite unfortunate.
> 
>   Mark
> 
> 

FWIW on i386 current r275874 I do no have these lockup issues
with nvidia GeForce Go 7300

I did find that though loading the nvidia kernel module in
/boot/loader.conf was not enough, I had to create a small
xorg.conf simply containing

Section "Device"
     Identifier     "Device0"
     Driver         "nvidia"
     VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
EndSection

or GLX instead of NV-GLX would try to be loaded

grep GLX Xorg.0.log-without-xorg.conf

[ 21401.540] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module  304.125  Mon Dec  1 20:18:39 PST 
2014
[ 21401.540] Loading extension GLX
[ 21401.782] (EE) Failed to initialize GLX extension (Compatible NVIDIA 
X driver not found)

grep GLX Xorg.0.log-with-xorg.conf

[ 21298.014] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module  304.125  Mon Dec  1 20:18:39 PST 
2014
[ 21298.014] Loading extension GLX
[ 21298.839] Loading extension NV-GLX
[ 21298.931] (II) Initializing extension GLX

http://mail.mikej.com/Xorg.0.log-without-xorg.conf
http://mail.mikej.com/Xorg.0.log-with-xorg.conf

I also have both devd and hald running.

--mikej