I recently solved an annoying issue that kept popping up for me. I was having problems getting any sort of DRM (be it this xfree-drm or ati-drivers) for my Radeon 8500 working on my NForce2 motherboard, even with the newly patched kernels with NForce2 AGP support. Attempting to use DRM would result in anything from a refusal to start X, to a hard system lock up. However, after accidentaly disabling the fbconsole in grub when testing out a new kernel, I discovered that without using the fbconsole, DRM worked perfectly! So, there must be some sort of issue between the VESA fbconsole and the DRM code.
Can we have some more information please? What kernels are affected? Have you tried development-sources // vanilla-sources? It's fully possible that there are incompatibilites between VESA fbconsole code and the DRM code. Both should be under 'development / unstable' items in the kernel configuration, and as a result you may get problems...
Well, I was having crashes with pfeifer-sources 2.4.20-r1_pre11 and with gaming-sources 2.4.20-r6 most recently, and some other kernels in the past as well (including one of the gs-sources versions). Basically anything with the NForce2 AGP patches, which leaves out gentoo-sources.
How about 2.6 or gentoo-dev-sources?
Could you also try upgrading your BIOS? Some of the older nforce2 boards had buggy BIOS which mucked up a lot of things.
From 2003, closing.
