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System Freezes Caused by the Proprietary Nvidia Driver

Posted by Marcus D. Hanwell on
Today my system locked up yet again, and as far as I can tell this is due to the proprietary Nvidia driver I use and has been present for many driver versions. I keep meaning to look into this problem further and then it gets better and I forget again. I can use the nv driver to get rid of the problem, but lose all 3D acceleration too. How many others have this problem?

After googling it appears that it could be a problem with something in the OpenGL part of the driver, and so I have turned off the OpenGL screensaver I was using as a test. It also seems to be more common when the system is under heavy load too. I have wondered if it might be a problem with TwinView, which I use with my two 17" TFT screens. It is certainly an irritating bug - it is usually necessary to ssh into the system and kill -9 the X process to fix it.

The normal error message accompanying these crashes in /var/log/messages is,
Aug 27 04:48:02 cryos NVRM: Xid: 25, L1 -> L0
Aug 27 04:48:02 cryos NVRM: Xid: 13, 0000 02003900 00000039 00000328 00000000 00000800

After searching on this I found a couple of posts here and here. Also another here suggesting it could be an X86_64 issue here. A post here also indicates very similar issues with Debian. This bug seems to be a similar issue.

I haven't been able to get any more information than the log messages above, and the fact that X gets stuck in a loop consuming 100% of the CPU cycles until it is killed. Not even the keyboard/mouse respond so you need a second system to log in with... I guess this is the problem with a black box binary linked into my kernel - there is no way to debug it. Submitted a bug report to nVidia about a year ago and never received a reply from them.

I have tried enabling and disabling all sorts but nothing seems to change it, and the crashes only happen every day to every few weeks over different xorg-x11 versions and nvidia-kernel versions. It also doesn't affect my work system which is very similar, but only has one TFT screen and a lower end nvidia graphics card...

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David T. on :

David T.This is certainly a "nvidia" driver problem. I am seeing it on my dual Celeron system using a Geforce2 MX card. My Athlon (32-bit) using a GeForce4 4200Ti is unaffected. Both are running the latest and greatest from Nvidia. If I switch over to the "nv" driver then my dual celly will work just fine.

Fwiw, I get these hangs even when no 3D is being displayed.

Gary Roberts on :

Gary RobertsMy system has been locking up; no keyboard or mouse response. I have tried several drivers EVGA Nvidia, and even Nvidia betas. I even installed a stronger power supply( from 550W to 850W). Didn't help. I finaly deleted Nvidia drivers and used Vista driver and the lockups stopped. The problem with that approach is gaming and sleep mode don't work. My conclusion is system lock up has to be driver problem.

Enrique on :

EnriqueI got the same error yesterday, I found out that it was because I had changed the RAM timings in the BIOS from 333 to 222. The system crashed often, and I had problems with tar and bzip2. After I went back to the standart timings, my system became stable again.

izaac on :

izaacI got this issues some time ago, i tried everything, and the solution was to install the latest nvidia driver (7676) from portage.

Now it works great, hope this help you.

Marcus D. Hanwell on :

Marcus D. HanwellI don't know if this error is composed of several smaller bugs or not. I am using the latest ~amd64 nvidia drivers, always do. I have played with memory timings (underclocking), my memory is clocked at 333 MHz right now. The GPU is an FX5900XT and is not overclocked in anyway. Tried the range of AGP apertures and underclocking to AGP 4X, with SBA on and off etc...

I am only affected once every couple of days to once every couple of weeks. A simple SSH in and kill -9 X cures it, but it sure is irritating. Never happened once on my work system though with very similar set up and Gentoo there too...

opello on :

opelloI've been getting these mystical lockups on my Inspiron 8200 (GeForce 4 440go), just after sitting a while, dragging windows around a lot, and using the Ctrl+Alt+NumPadMinus to 'zoom in' ... but none of the afore mentioned actions are required for it to happen ... just letting it sit seems to do it too. Quite odd. Still no solution here, but I'm going to try downgrading a ways in a while.

netegis.com on :

netegis.comThanks for the extra info

Marcus D. Hanwell on :

Marcus D. HanwellInterestingly my PSU went recently and I bought a new PSU, motherboard, CPU and GPU. Since I did this I haven't had a single lockup (now using PCI-E 6600GT in same configuration). I do wonder if part of it is hardware dependent as well...

Gonzalo Aguilar on :

Gonzalo AguilarYep. I'm suffering this also. I've a GeForce FX 5950 Ultra and a AMD 32bit and sure. This is really irritating. I'm developer and never know when it will hang. I observed that system goes 100% with one process on the top X.

This seems to be a X.org vs Nvidia related I never had this fail with XFree86.

Hope that someone finds the solution.

Josito on :

JositoMy system also freezes. I realized that lowering the resolution to 1024x768 (24bpp) the probability of a lockup also become lower. And OpenGL performs much better. But icons look very big in Gnome.

It could be great to have another mechanism to kill the X pressing the off button instead of having to reboot the machine or login for other host.

(Offtopic) I'm a developer. I have seen some kind of this problem at work in a HP-UX workstation. I think it has to do with X callbacks at the driver level that make a lock in a thread, so the CPU usage raise to 100% and X not responding. X can do better avoiding the locks, and the driver too doing a workaround.

Marcus D. Hanwell on :

Marcus D. HanwellI have since upgraded to a dual core system, PCI-E system and the problems seemed to disappear. Very stable but basically a different system! I guess their drivers have bugs and good luck in tracking them down if you are having issues.

I for one will be going with Intel and/or ATI if their open source drivers improve to a useful level. For now I am stuck with the nVidia binary blob though... May be nouveau will be good enough one day too?

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