# NV unable to determine video memory error



## makoerber (May 13, 2009)

After FBSD 7.0 I've been unable to get the NVS140M (nvidia card) to operate with the NV driver.  I get the subject error message and the server fails to start.  (All worked well under 7.0 i386 kernel.)  I'm currently running on the VESA drive .

I'm running...

CPU: Intel Core2 Duo (T9500)
Kernel (today): 7.2-Release Generic amd64 (however, 7.1, 8.0, i386 or amd64 all fail the same way)
nvidia: NVS140M, rev 161

Any ideas on a solution?  Is there something I can do to help locate the problem?

thanks
mike


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## tangram (May 14, 2009)

Please post the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It will help troubleshooting.

Any reason why you don't use NVIDIA's binary drivers, x11/nvidia-driver?


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## adamk (May 14, 2009)

tangram said:
			
		

> Please post the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It will help troubleshooting.
> 
> Any reason why you don't use NVIDIA's binary drivers, x11/nvidia-driver?



He said he was using amd64.

Mind you, the 'nv' driver is primarily maintained by nvidia, and has been accused of being obfuscated, so there may be issues with it that only nvidia can resolve.

Adam


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## makoerber (May 14, 2009)

tangram said:
			
		

> Please post the contents of /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /etc/X11/xorg.conf. It will help troubleshooting.
> 
> Any reason why you don't use NVIDIA's binary drivers, x11/nvidia-driver?



The nvidia is i386 only...I wish it worked on amd64.  It worked well for me in the past.

I did some digging into the code and it looks like BAR1sizeKB is not getting set (or is set to zero) in g80_driver.c (xf86-video-nv package).  I forced it equal the the amount of video RAM, but this gave a "frame buffer error" in a later code block in g80_driver.c.

I don't know how to pursue this any further since there appears to be too much coupling between this code and the pciaccess.h/c stuff for me.  (I'm only a casual hacker.)

I do note that with this machine under netBSD 5.0 amd64,the NV driver works.  After reinstalling FBSD I checked the g80_driver.c code (in fact I used it in place of the FBSD version)...same error.  

Thanks in advance for any workable solutions.

mike


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## tangram (May 14, 2009)

makoerber said:
			
		

> All worked well under 7.0 i386 kernel.





> Kernel (today): 7.2-Release Generic amd64 (however, 7.1, 8.0, i386 or amd64 all fail the same way)



Focused on the first part and missed the last part. :/

Anyways you need to be more verbose (e.g. logs, configuration files, etc).


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## SirDice (May 14, 2009)

Have you tried setting it by hand?



> VideoRam  mem
> This optional entry specifies the amount of video  ram  that  is installed  on  the  graphics board.  This is measured in kBytes. In most cases this is not required  because the  Xorg server probes  the graphics  board to determine  this quantity. The driver-specific documentation should indicate when it  might be needed.



From xorg.conf(5).


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## makoerber (May 14, 2009)

I just tried setting VideoRam...no change to the error...still "unable to determine amount of video memory" and exit...

mike


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