BUG: kmod-nvidia-PAE bricks my notebook

[Rainer Koenig]

Hi there,

quick introduction of myself to this list: I'm the person responsible
for bringing Linux on Desktop PCs & Notebooks at Fujitsu Siemens
Computers. Doing this job for about 7 years now, but today (btw: my
birthday ;-) I got a very nice gift.

The machine that is involved is our CELSIUS H270 mobile workstation.
A spec of that Notebook can be found here:
http://docs.fujitsu-siemens.com/dl.aspx?id=0d23742b-0900-4dc2-96cb-cfb46f8ab92a

A customer reported display problems after installing
kmod-nvidia-PAE-180.25-1.fc10.i686.rpm on his machine. He got the
display repaired but after the next boot the problem occured again.
This is why the problem arrived at my desk.

I took my own H270 notebook and installed Fedora 10 on it. Then I
added the yum repos for rpmfusion and installed the latest
kmod-nvidia-PAE.i686 on my machine. Next step was reboot, and all
I saw was the progress bar on the bottom of the screen. In the moment
the X server was supposed to start the screen went black.

Turning off the machine and turning it on again results in
- still a black screen, not even BIOS startup is reported
- system obviously doesn't boot, you don't see any hard disk activity
- even connecting an external display via DVI doesn't help

So it seems that I can fully confirm our customers problem. The
installation of the nidia driver from rpmfusion bricks the machine.

Don't worry, I don't want to blame this to you. Our main concern is now:

1. What is exactly damaged? I'm from software development and can't
tell, but I will forward the "bricked machine" to our hardware
specialists to see if the can do a "post mortem" analysis.

2. We will contact nNVIDIA tomorrow. One of the next steps in analysis
is that we reinstall Fedora 10 again and then see what happens if we use
the nvidia-installer from the nVidia website. If we're lucky we can
still brick the machine, then we can urge nVIDIA to debug what's wrong.
If we're unlucky we have to find out what's different in the RPMs from
rpmfusion.

So my first question to you is if you can provide information on which
"official" build from nVidia your RPMs are based.

Thank you for your attention
Rainer

P.S.: I hope this is the correct mailing list to discuss this problem.
There is no hope in putting this into Red Hat's bugzilla since Red Hat
doesn't want to support the proprietary nVidia driver.
-- 
Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Rainer Koenig
Project Manager Linux Business Clients
Dept. IP BC E SW OSE

Fujitsu Siemens Computers
Bürgermeister-Ullrich-Str. 100
86199 Augsburg
Germany

Telephone: +49-821-804-3321
Telefax:   +49-821-804-2131
Mail:      mailto:Rainer.Koenig at fujitsu-siemens.com

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