[ut2004] Crashes in 3270-1 and 3323

Adar Dembo adar at stanford.edu
Tue Sep 14 20:43:24 EDT 2004


On Tue, 2004-09-14 at 15:15, Adar Dembo wrote:
> Most interesting.
> 
> I made one small change today to my X setup. In
> modprobe.d/nvidia-kernel-nkc, under the nvidia alias, I added "option
> nvidia NVReg_EnableAGPSBA=1 NVReg_EnableAGPFW=1", so that when I stopped
> gdm, unloaded the module, and restarted gdm, "cat
> /proc/drivers/nvidia/agp/status" said that SBA and Fastwrites were
> enabled.
> 
> After making this change, UT2004 would start just as it had in the past.
> No problems, no glitches, nothing. I've played several times now, and it
> seems ALMOST flawless. The one flaw I've had was that once, after
> quitting UT2k4, gdm crashed, restarted itself, and put me back in the
> gdmlogin screen. It killed my entire session too.
> 
> Not a huge problem, at least I can now play the game, and like I said it
> has only happened once so far. Virtual consoles still work, switching
> refresh rates and such still work. So I'm left with two questions:
> 
> 1) Did enabling SBA/FW really fix the problem, or is it just random that
> it works now?
> 
> 2) Why did gdm crash that one time that UT2k4 exited?
> 
> -Adar

I think I can answer #2. My setup uses ALSA's dmix plugin wherever
possible because the NF2 Soundstorm drivers are not capable of using the
APU's hardware mixing yet. Well, NVIDIA released some drivers that can,
but they are OSS, not ALSA. So I haven't looked at them.

To get around this, I use plug:dmix in ALSA to do software mixing for
most of my desktop apps. However, UT2004 has never worked with this.
When I try and pipe the sound in UT2004 into dmix, I get 1-2 FPS and no
sound at all. So when I play UT2004, it uses the OSS emulation that ALSA
provides.

In the past, upon exiting UT2004, the ut2004-bin process is still left
running. And when I kill -9 it, suddenly I hear all the sounds that had
played on my desktop since I ran UT2004. All of the apps that play sound
periodically, like gaim or evolution, were hung, and now that UT2004 is
no longer hogging the sound device, they all play.

Now, the behavior is different. These sounds still hang and play when
ut2004-bin is killed, however, if a sound queues up like this, gdm will
die instead. This kills all of my apps, including UT2004. So the new
behavior goes like this. I quit out of UT2004. GDM dies. I hear all the
sounds that were queued up. GDM restarts itself. I am back to the login
screen.

As a measure against this, I've taken to disabling the gaim and
evolution sounds before starting up UT2004, but honestly, this has
always sucked. I'm not sure why UT2004 doesn't play nice with ALSA dmix,
but as a result, not only does it improperly shut itself down, but now
it causes this.

-Adar




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