No More NVidia

I just wasted 3 hours of my life fixing a problem with Xorg that started after a reboot. Seriously, I didn’t change anything in software, just cleaned some of the fans on the motherboard that were getting a bit clogged with dust. Turns out the problem was the evil binary only NVidia drivers.

Xorg was chewing 100% CPU, and wouldn’t die when politely kill -9 ‘ed. I could ssh in from another box, thankfully, but after a couple of minutes, Xorg was just mindlessly spinning on CPU and I couldn’t do anything but a power-off reset.

The tipoff was some log entries like this:

(WW) NVIDIA(0): WAIT (2, 6, 0x80

Some googling (via lynx!) suggested that maybe turning off AGP would help, or maybe disabling GLX.

One of those things worked. I don’t know which, because I changed two things at once. Yes, I know I suck, and that’s really poor troubleshooting procedure. I’m over it.

If you have the same problem, try these two settings:

Section "Module"
#       Load    "glx"
EndSection

Section "Device"
        Option          "NvAGP" "0"
EndSection

I think next time I’ll buy a video card with better driver support under linux.

Flaky hardware seems to be the bane of my life right now.

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