Bug 186209

Summary:	2nd X server gives blank screen with nvidia-drivers-100.14.11
Product:	Gentoo Linux	Reporter:	Triffid Hunter <bugzilla_gentoo>
Component:	[OLD] Unspecified	Assignee:	X11 External Driver Maintainers <x11-drivers>
Status:	RESOLVED UPSTREAM
Severity:	minor
Priority:	High
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86
OS:	Linux
Whiteboard:
Package list:		Runtime testing required:	---

Description Triffid Hunter 2007-07-22 11:33:28 UTC

I use a script similar to games-util/xgame to run games. I tried the latest nvidia drivers, but any games started this way give a blank monitor. The monitor indicates that it's switched on, but simply displays black;

The game produces sounds etc so it's appariently running fine. starting them normally in the first X server works as expected, and downgrading to nvidia-drivers-1.0.9755-r1 fixes the problem.

I have this occuring on two quite different machines.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. emerge >=x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-100 xgame
2. xgame some_glx_game

Actual Results:  
screen is blank, but game sounds are heard

Expected Results:  
graphics AND sound

one machine on which this occurs is an athlon xp, nforce2 mobo, fx5200, CRT monitor.
the other is an x64 sempron (with 32 bit install), via motherboard, fx5500, LCD monitor.

Comment 1 Jakub Moc (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2007-07-22 11:45:08 UTC


*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 186183 ***

Comment 2 Triffid Hunter 2007-07-22 11:56:18 UTC

Are you sure it's the same bug? I don't see the relationship..

This bug relates to systems with only one display (either crt or dfp, and no twinview) which blanks when more than one Xorg instance is started (eg; xinit /path/to/some/app -- :1 ), whereas bug 186183 is about the dfp not coming on if twinview+crt is used, citing "only one display found". Multiple Xorg instances is completely different to multiple screens, and I don't see those warnings on either of my faulting machines.

If you know of a link between them, tell us about it :)

Comment 3 Doug Goldstein (RETIRED) gentoo-dev

2007-07-23 13:45:54 UTC

So you're starting multiple X instances on the same video card / monitor and expect it to work happily? These are binary drivers that do what they wish with the memory space of the video card, they don't have to respect that context switching at all and don't support context switching with other video mode drivers/modification scripts, which is possible your xgame script is doing.

Since these are closed source drivers and there really is nothing we can do to address any issues with them, please contact nVidia for resolution with the issue.

Some places of interest might be their Linux discussion forum and support pages:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14
http://www.nvidia.com/page/support.html