Re: Fwd: Re: several SIGSEGV bugs in debian 7/AMD64
On 28.12.2013 19:27, John Paul Adrian Glaubitz wrote:
You can still file the bug report against a particular package. If it
turns out to be assigned to the wrong package, we can still change
that afterwards at any time.
Right, I just wanted to spare us from the trouble by getting one or the
other response as to what might be the right thing.
Also, you still need to be more specific. A bug report in the sense
of "Debian 7 crashes on my old computer, Debian 6 didn't", isn't helpful
at all. Debian comes with over 15.000 source packages and there are
billions of hardware combinations out there.
…I believe I *had* outlined it a slight bit more specific… ;-)
Unless someone at Debian can get hold of a crystal ball, it's simply
impossible to debug your problem with the information that you
provided.
…will provide logs etc. and file a report against, well, let's start
with the kernel, since the Segsegv/dump messages are not gone with
nouveau, just a reduced to a handful instead of about fifty (I just
tested that).
–– newer BIOS for my machine does not exist. Current/last is from
2009. And, like I wrote, it works perfectly with debian 6 (kernel 2.6)
or winXP/win7. *without* *any* problems. And I don't exactly care if
APM/ACPI standards have changed in the meantime. Debian used to be
backward-compatible to even twenty-years-old hardware and their specs.
You got me wrong. ACPI standards didn't change, I never said that. What
I said is that lots of BIOS firmware has incorrect implementations of
the ACPI specification and you probably need to patch your ACPI tables
(there are tools for that out there).
Yes, I understood that; what I tried to say was "my ACPI seems to
conform to standards since no problems arise when I use debian 6,
WindowsXP or Windows7" (Ok, maybe I should have written that sentence
earlier). Unless, of course, those *assume* every computer has wrong
ACPI and hotfix them in run-time. I still might do a check (will check
them against the standard, at least). Still, why patch tables which
work correctly except with deb7? just to see what happens? I remember
the good old saying "never touch a running system" ;-)
In any case, it's still your job to write a detailed bug report and
trying to pin point your problem to a certain package, e.g. "Updating
nvidia-glx from version 123.45 to 155.99 brought my graphics with
my nVidia GeForce 123 graphics adapter". Again, without this
information, any attempt to help you will be futile.
I wrote something about that, in the line of "nouveau is too slow and
doesn't offer 3D acceleration, with downloaded NVidias driver releases
295, 304, or 331 the system becomes unpredictable and KDM, FVWM, WMII
and others just SIGSEGV".
–– no capacitor or other hardware related issues. Cannot be, also,
because things would shred under debian 6 and winXP/win7, too, which
they don't. Things are a bit older, but tended well to.
Bad capacitors tend to cause all kinds of problems, including those
that don't make any sense at first sight. I have often seen people
overlooking bad capacitors, especially since not all bad capacitors
tend to bulge.
Right. But still similar or the same consequences would show in the
other OSes which run on the same machine if capacitors or diodes were
the reason. As far as my potentiometers and tools state, everything is
in order.
–– with NVidia modules tailor-made and compiled for the running kernel
by the installer, the current X screen (the tty "behind" it) shows
SIGSEGV and dump notes with/from/by several system librares. I'll see
if I can find a way to send you a screendump/log-extract.
Well, if it turns out to be a bug in the proprietary nVidia driver,
there is nothing Debian can actually do to fix this. This driver
is closed-source, thus only nVidia can make changes to it to fix
bugs.
Let's assume it is an NVidia bug. Shouldn't it show in older kernels,
too, like, in 2.6? The 290 and 295 releases do exactly what they ought
to do on debian 6 and its predecessor, debian 5, and if I install from
the very same files in debian 7 –– poof (so to say).
Debian can fix bugs in the nouveau driver only which is recommended
for older nVidia cards anyway unless you want to do some serious
gaming. My Debian workstation sports a GeForce 210 which isn't that
old but also not a gaming board and I have been using nouveau ever
since without any problems. It's surely not fast enough for 3D
gaming, but 2D stuff is fine.
That's why I need 3D acceleration: gaming, and 3D modeling/rendering.
Hence, my indirect question if there is an
official 2.6 kernel for debian 7.
No, there isn't and it's certainly not sensible to use older kernels.
There might be important daemons like udevd which might need a more
recent kernel.
I don't want to experiment with the
2.6 sources on an "unknown" and differently behaving operating system
myself, and I don't know if it even would run without compiling the
whole 7 distro from scratch again.
What? Building your own kernel is one of the easiest things to do. Fetch
the source, unpack it, copy your current config from /boot-`uname -r`
into the root directory of the sources as ".config" and run "make
oldconfig".
As you say yourself above, some things like "udev" etc. pp. would
certainly have to be rebuilt to use the 2.6 features and not to try to
use 3.x ones. Again we rotate to "building the distro from scratch on a
2.6 kernel".
Please do not tell me "heck, just buy a more modern gfx card or a whole
new machine, will you", because that wouldn't accomplish anything. I
need the old ones. And debian once was a distribution that ran on
everything from oldest to newest.
No, but you should do a little more research yourself. Firstly, this
is not the "debian-user" mailing list but "debian-devel", we don't
provide support here. And, secondly, you can't expect people here
fixing your computer for free. Nothing indicates so far that your
problems are related to any bugs, you are just making assumptions.
…based on a)experience, b)a bit of technical IT know-how, c)long-time
use of several OSes, d)being a former IT techie. Not every
"non-debian-developer" is a fool, you know. And I didn't ask anybody to
"fix my computer", I was noting things and asking about the SIGSEGV
phenomenon I encountered and drew the most appropriate conclusions
(which *might* be conceivable if one reads everthing I wrote). Other
users are most of the time not likely to be of much help because most of
them are mouse twiddlers that *might* know how to open a shell and sudo
something.
You aren't a bit biased and/or pissed in that last paragraph, are you?
Again, file a proper and detailed bug report against a particular
package and people will gladly be helping you.
Will do that.
Cheers,
Adrian
Cheering back,
René
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