Nvidia drivers and 2.6.x kernel

Hi Everyone

I'm not sure if this has been done to death or not, but i can not get the 4496 and 5328 versions of the NVidia kernel to work on the 2.6.1 version of (you guessed it) Linux.

I've googled about but not really found any great stuff. I did find this:

http://www.kerneltrap.org/node/view/1804
and from there the link to http://minion.de

I've tried it with both versions of the driver, with both versions of the drivers Makefile (Makefile.nvidia and Makefile.kbuild).

With the installer and with just make install (make kernel_module_install). The message i get is that the module is the wrong format.
The files that i can get to appear in:
/lib/modules/2.6.1/kernel/drivers/video are nvidia.ko & nvidia.o Originally i thought they were the same file, but they have different sizes (afterall)

chakkerz@stormcrow:/lib/modules/2.6.1/kernel/drivers/video$ ls -l
total 4648
-rw-rw-r--    1 root     root      2376880 Jan 21 12:14 nvidia.ko
-rw-rw-r--    1 root     root      2376702 Jan 21 12:15 nvidia.o

so: i've tried unpatched, patched, old and new drivers, installer and make, make in the installers root, and it's sub director usr/src/nv ... oh yes, and different versions of the patch.

could someone please tell me where to find out how to make this work, because linux without GUI is little use to me.

In case it matters:
This is an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ on a Gigabyte GA-7N400 Pro2 MoBo (nforce2). The FFX is an Abit Siluro GeForce 4 Ti4200 OTES. 2 sticks of 256 Corsair DDR in dual channel. The kernel compiles i tried were with AGPGART integrated (and the nforce/nforce2 also integrated) as well as AGPGART as a module. Most of the stuff i tried with AGPGART as a module.

with kind regards,
  Christian Unger

"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision" (Faithless - Reverence)

  Mobile:            0402 268904
  Internet:          http://naiv.sourceforge.net
  NAIV Status:
     Stable       Testing       Development
      0.2.3r2      0.3.0         0.3.1 - File Handling

"May there be mercy on man and machine for their sins" (Animatrix)

Complain to nVidia.

Tomasz Torcz                Only gods can safely risk perfection,     
[email protected]     it's a dangerous thing for a man.  -- Alia

yeah i did think about that, except
"
NVIDIA provides superior 3D graphics processors to the computer industry's leading add-in card manufacturers and PC OEMs. We do not sell any products directly to end users so we do not have a staff dedicated to end-user technical support. If you are having a problem with any NVIDIA-based product, please contact either the PC or board manufacturer of your product. "

So who writes the drivers??

with kind regards,
  Christian Unger

"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision" (Faithless - Reverence)

  Mobile:            0402 268904
  Internet:          http://naiv.sourceforge.net
  NAIV Status:
     Stable       Testing       Development
      0.2.3r2      0.3.0         0.3.1 - File Handling

"May there be mercy on man and machine for their sins" (Animatrix)

torsdagen den 22 januari 2004 00.28 skrev Christian Unger:

NVidia does. Check the download link for Linux/FreeBSD drivers and in particular the link to the Nvidial Linux forum.

-- robin

El Thu, 22 Jan 2004 10:12:17 +1100 Christian Unger <[email protected]> escribió:

Have you tried to contact Nvidia? If lots of people ask them for the drivers they'll develop them faster, me thinks...

Did you try the installers from http://www.sh.nu/download/nvidia/ ?
http://minion.de refers to them, and they appear to work fine here.

Wrong (or no) module-init-tools? Mine currently is module-init-tools-3.0-0.pre5.2mdk from the Mandrake cooker, although I've not had trouble for some time with any version. The nvidia.ko file is the one that will load under a 2.6 kernel. The wrong format message sounds like you don't have module-init-tools installed, although I would expect getting your nvidia card to run would be the least of your problems.

You could also switch over in your XFConfig-4 to the nv driver that is part of the kernel build. That should get your system running with X, letting you solve the nvidia driver problems later.

What messages do you get about what is going wrong? What happens when you so a modprobe nvidia? What does your log file from XFree show?

Paul

About module-init-tools ... dunno ... never heard of it, I'm on Slackware 9.1 so ... dunno ... Not sure. But like you say, if i could not initalize modules the nvidia module should be the least of my worries, plus everything loads in 2.4.22

on make install i get:
FATAL: Error inserting nvidia (/lib/modules/2.6.1/kernel/drivers/video/ nvidia.ko): Invalid module format

That's the same thing that modprobe nvidia gets.
I'll check the nv thing out.

One interesting error / warning i get during boot is this (from /var/log/ syslog) :

Jan 22 10:43:08 stormcrow kernel: nvidia: version magic '2.6.1 preempt K7 
gcc-3.2' should be '2.6.1 preempt K7 gcc-3.3'
Jan 22 10:46:15 stormcrow kernel: nvidia: version magic '2.6.1 preempt K7 

gcc-3.2' should be '2.6.1 preempt K7 gcc-3.3'

Not sure what to make of this. I know that 4496 had issues with the gcc version i was running a while backed, and i had to hack the installer script to ignore that (though i'm sure there is a switch for this stuff ... i was over reading at that point).

As for the XFree log ... i don't have that one ...

with kind regards,
  Christian Unger

"You don't need eyes to see, you need vision" (Faithless - Reverence)

  Mobile:            0402 268904
  Internet:          http://naiv.sourceforge.net
  NAIV Status:
     Stable       Testing       Development
      0.2.3r2      0.3.0         0.3.1 - File Handling

"May there be mercy on man and machine for their sins" (Animatrix)

The 2.6 kernel needs new tools to load the kernel modules, because they have a different format (not just a different extension with .ko). module-init-tools provides those necessary upgrades, and also aids in creating /etc/modprobe.conf, which is used instead of /etc/modules.conf under the 2.6 kernels for loading modules on startup. If you don't have module-init-tools, then I'm not surprised you are having problems. You probably need an updated mkinitrd as well if you are using an initrd on system startup.

They should be at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/rusty/modules/

You probably want to read a document that summarized the changes that happened in 2.6, which is where the link above was located. It is
http://www.linux.org.uk/~davej/docs/post-halloween-2.6.txt

Not knowing much about Slackware, I couldn't give you much help about where the best place to get your tools from might be, except for the source above.

/var/log/XFree86.0.log would be the place. I don't think there will be anything interesting there until you get your module-init-tools installed.

I hope this has helped.

Paul

Slackware 9.1 comes with module-init-tools in anticipation of 2.6. did you run a full install or select by hand?

Rob Couto
[email protected]
Rules for computing success:
1) Attitude is no substitute for competence.
2) Ease of use is no substitute for power.
3) Safety matters; use a static-free hammer.
--

My guess is you need to have a "built" kernel tree. Basically just build the kernel, install, reboot, then without touching the kernel tree you built rebuild the nvidia driver. I hope that makes sense.

Josh McKinney		     |	Webmaster: http://joshandangie.org
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