random neuron misfires

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008 at 8:51 am | 11,115 views | trackback url

After spending a couple of weeks testing thousands of different options and configurations on my T61p to try to find out why it would not suspend/resume, I managed to come up with a working configuration.

The side-effect of this new configuration is that now X no longer randomly crashes on me in the middle of whatever I’m doing (a known issue with nvidia_drv.so) and now suspend and resume works with the nVidia Quadro FX 570M card in my T61p.

In order to stop X11 from crashing, I had to tell the nVidia driver to disable ‘fb, ‘glx’ and ‘dri’ in Section “Module” of my xorg.conf. That section looks like this:

        Section "Module"
            Load           "freetype"
            # snip other loaded modules

            Disable        "glx"
            Disable        "dri"
            Disable        "fb"
        EndSection

Lower down under Section “Device”, I have the following:

        Section "Device"
            Identifier     "Configured Video Device"
            Driver         "nvidia"
        #   Driver         "nv"
            Option         "NvAGP"       "4"

            Option         "MultiGPU" "AA"
            Option         "TripleBuffer" "true"

            BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
        EndSection

The amount of configurable options for nVidia cards is staggering (77 separate Option params with various number of values and effects on the overall performance of the system). I tried nearly all of them with positive and negative effects. Then I started narrowing down the least amount of options that had a direct affect on my crashes and suspend/resume issue. That is represented in the above snippets.

I can no longer use my fancy glx screensavers, but I don’t care. I can now suspend and resume, and X doesn’t crash… (so far).

I’m using v169.12 of the x86_64 driver from nVidia directly, if anyone is interested in testing/duplicating my results.

(follow-ups to this may be found in the thread I started for this on the Linux Thinkpad Mailing List).

Last Modified: Saturday, March 5th, 2016 @ 23:12

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