After installing a new gentoo system from an old one (chrooting) I found that with 2.4.22-ck kernel, Xfree failed to load with the 'nvidia' driver from the nvidia-kernel package. After switching to the native 'nv' driver, I was able start up X. After switching to the 2.4.20-gentoo-r8 kernel (same kernel config) I was also able to start up X with the 'nvidia' driver. Reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. compile (and install) kernel 2.4.22-ck 2. emerge nvidia-kernel 3. reboot. 4. startx. Actual Results: X did not die gracefully by which I mean dropping me back to a prompt. It instead. gave me a corrupted terminal which still seemed to accept input (Ctl-Alt-Del to reboot worked) XF86Config and system info on request.
can you reboot into the -ck kernel, and do modprobe nvidia, and tell us any errors you get, or anything from dmesg
Created attachment 20806 [details] logs for nvidia and X after reboot and reemerging nvidia-kernel... attached tarball includes: XFree86.0.log.ck # from /var/log/ XFree86.0.log.gentoo-r8 # from ditto ck.dmesg ck.nvidia.modprobe startx-nvidia-ck.log # from 'startx 2> startx-xxx.log' startx-nvidia-gentoo-r8.log # ditto the gentoo-r8 files are the logs from a gentoo-r8 kernel and a successful X startup.
Sounds like you're missing AGP support or that's failing somehow...
I reproduced this on another system using ck-sources 2.4.22 and this is referenced in bug #33875 which seems to have the problematic code located. I've had reports that using nvidia-kernel 4363-r3 works fine, so it's a bug in something...
From the nvidia-glx README: Q: I just upgraded my kernel, and now the NVIDIA kernel module won't load. What's wrong? A: The kernel interface layer of the NVIDIA kernel module must be compiled specifically for the configuration and version of your kernel. If you upgrade your kernel, then the simplest solution is to reinstall the driver.
Let is know if this is still broken in newer releases.