Nvidia-drivers and segfaults

kettuz · n00b Joined: 25 Dec 2004 Posts: 27

At some point last Autumn a very curious problem emerged. Segfaults. At first I thought it was only connected to Opera, because it's nothing new for the operapluginwrapper to crash. However, quite soon it became evident that this is something different. I knew it when my firefox segfaulted as well. Add to this the crashing of xorg, strange occasions of screen going on and off and even emerge failing due to segfault.

Now, the curious thing. This doesn't happen if I don't start xorg. If I do, closing it doesn't help, the problem persist. Now, after some research I have come to believe nvidia-drivers is to be blamed for this problem. Some others have mentioned on these forums about the new drivers having made their computer unstable.

Now, why haven't I just downgraded? The reason: older versions of the driver were removed from Portage last Autumn. I believe it was at that time these problems began, because I had set to my package.keywords restrictions on which nvidia-drivers to install, but when the old drivers went away, emerge didn't respect the restriction anymore and installed the new version.

I was able to find the earlier version of the driver (older 304 series) from layouts, but the driver doesn't compile with the newer kernel sources it seems.

So, what should I do? Go back to earlier kernel and udev? Complain on the Nvidia developer forums? Any suggestions?

PaulBredbury · Watchman Joined: 14 Jul 2005 Posts: 7310

Take a look at Nvidia's README, where it has advice such as trying:

kettuz · n00b Joined: 25 Dec 2004 Posts: 27

Tried it. Also upgraded to the latest nvidia-drivers version. For a while I thought the problem was solved, unfortunately just today operapluginwrapper has been segfaulting all day long and only a few minutes ago even Sylpheed (!) segfaulted. This is really weird.

NeddySeagoon · Posted: Mon May 13, 2013 10:11 pm Post subject:

kettuz,

All the ebuilds that were ever in the portage tree are stored in the attic. Fetch the ebuild of your choice, put it in your local overlay, (see the handbook) and emerge in the normal way.

You may have problems finding the old drivers to download.
_________________
Regards,

NeddySeagoon

Computer users fall into two groups:-
those that do backups
those that have never had a hard drive fail.