Strange FreeBSD Issues (USB/Nvidia Drivers)

[bjstick]

I have used FreeBSD in the past with no problems. I tried it out around 4.2, and used it as a primary desktop OS after Nvidia released their first GLX drivers. I tried revisiting it recently, and it is giving me nothing but trouble. See below:

1) When booting, if there is a USB hard drive attached I get an instant kernel panic right after it is detected.

2) I can unplug my USB drive and the system will boot. However, during boot my other USB devices (mouse/keyboard) drop connection and I have to unplug them and plug them back in to have them reactivate.

3) NVidia driver does not work for me. I was able to boot into X using "nv" driver, but when I compiled nvidia-driver from ports and ran nvidia-xconfig, I get an error about "/dev/nvidiactl" not being found and X will not boot.

This was with 7.0-RELEASE. The same problems persist with PC-BSD 1.5.1 which is based on 6.3-RELEASE. In fact, when I select the "nvidia" driver during the initial boot, my system hard locks when testing the screen. I have no problems with Linux on this computer, and even Solaris works perfectly with the NVidia drivers and all attached USB devices. Also, I am able to run "special" versions of OS X Leopard with no problems on this machine. Only FreeBSD gives me these problems. OpenBSD boots up normally.

My system specs are:

Gigabyte GA-EX38-DS4 Motherboard
Intel E6850 Core2Duo
XFX NVidia 8800 320MB GTS (G80)
4GB GeiL PC6400 DDR2
150GB WD Raptor

AHCI/SATA Native mode are enabled in BIOS.

Anybody have any ideas?

[J65nko]

Maybe you can try the suggestions in http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...il/041893.html

[DrJ]

Your nvidia issues result from the amount of memory you have. You either have to turn off memory relocation in the BIOS (which Gigabyte usually does not have) or remove a GB of memory.

I too found this out the hard way.

I opened a thread on this topic long ago on nvnews.net, so nVidia knows about it. It has not been fixed.

[bjstick]

Originally Posted by J65nko

Maybe you can try the suggestions in http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/f...il/041893.html

I removed atkbd from the kernel when I was compiling it. I'll poke around in BIOS and see if there are any settings I can play around with.

[bjstick]

Originally Posted by DrJ

Your nvidia issues result from the amount of memory you have. You either have to turn off memory relocation in the BIOS (which Gigabyte usually does not have) or remove a GB of memory.

I too found this out the hard way.

I opened a thread on this topic long ago on nvnews.net, so nVidia knows about it. It has not been fixed.

Hmm, I didn't even think of that. I do know that when I am initially booting up I get a "500M over 4GB of RAM ignored" or something similar. I'll have to try that. Thanks for the tip.

[DrJ]

Just remember that memory on these boards is dual channel. It is fine for debugging purposes, but once you prove to yourself that it works, you will have to consider what you do about reaching 3 - 3.5 GB with standard modules.

Or you might conclude that "nv" is good enough -- that's usually the case unless you need 3D for something like gaming, or you use dual heads.

[tuck]

Originally Posted by bjstick

my system hard locks when testing the screen

After #startx ?
My System did the same thing, removing RAM helped.

[bjstick]

Originally Posted by tuck

After #startx ?
My System did the same thing, removing RAM helped.

In FreeBSD 7.0 I get the "/dev/nvidiactl" not being found error. The module is loaded and I have compat_5x enabled in rc.conf.

PC-BSD is the one that hard locks after startx.

[kusana]

Originally Posted by DrJ

Just remember that memory on these boards is dual channel. It is fine for debugging purposes, but once you prove to yourself that it works, you will have to consider what you do about reaching 3 - 3.5 GB with standard modules.

Or you might conclude that "nv" is good enough -- that's usually the case unless you need 3D for something like gaming, or you use dual heads.

Hello DrJ,
thank god that i saw your post! i have been trying to nail this issue for months... it had occurred to me that only freebsd has this strange memory size limitation, not windows or linux.
after reading your post, i couldn't find anything talked about on this topic through google. i would like to learn more why memory relocation is a problem in this scenario, and why memory size <3GB would work but not more. could you give me some references to read?
thanks a lot again

[Beastie]

I've never used Nvidia products, but perhaps the drivers that were available for FreeBSD at that time were 32-bit only and were subjected to the 3GB barrier.

Note that many things have changed in the past 9 years since this thread was started.