[Bug 56340] [Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS 32-bit] Severe instability of VIA Technologies Apollo MVP3 chipset and NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 M64 graphics

[bugzilla-daemon-CC+yJ3UmIYqDUpFQwHEjaQ@public.gmane.org]

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https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=56340

--- Comment #9 from mypersonalmailbox1-O5WfVfzUwx8@public.gmane.org ---
(In reply to comment #7)

Hi Robert,

A few more things I wanted to add.
I believe I updated the BIOS to the last version I was able to obtain from FIC.
FIC has now put their BIOS image behind a password protected FTP site so I no
longer have access to it.
I believe Version JE439 is the last version BIOS they released, and I got it
off their site a few years ago.
The BIOS itself is dated from Year 2000.
I also believe I have changed some of the BIOS settings related to AGP for this
mainboard, but it has made no difference in terms of freeze behavior.
Again, this is a strange problem considering that some NVIDIA RIVA TNT2 64
cards do work fine with the FIC VA-503+ mainboard, but the VisionTek one in
particular doesn't work well (Also, the Dell pulled one doesn't work well,
either.).
        Actually, I should also add that I remember seeing an error message
that said something like this with the VisionTek RIVA TNT2 64 graphics card
right before a freeze,

"GPU crash: switching to ShadowFB instead"

What does this type of an error message mean?
I will try to obtain a kern.log file that confirms this error message.

Regards,

fpgahardwareengineer


> (In reply to comment #5)
> > Regarding the reason for the freeze, I can think of the following.
> > 
> > - Is Nouveau is accessing the VGA BIOS of the card during boot, and the VGA
> > BIOS is a little buggy?
> > - Does the VGA BIOS's initialization code configuring RIVA TNT2 64 in a
> > certain way that contributes to the freeze with Apollo MVP3 chipset?
> 
> I would suspect the latter - these old VIA AGP implementations were
> notoriously unstable and problematic even in Windows and it's not unlikely
> that different BIOS versions may configure the card differently (AGP 2X/4X,
> AGP fast writes on/off, etc.)
> 
> You can also try updating the motherboard BIOS and try playing with any
> AGP-related BIOS settings to see if they change the situation.

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