freebsd stable - Jan 2006 - X.org 6.9 doesn't work with NVidia 7800 GTX (fwd)

I sent this to "freebsd-x11" and didn't hear a peep back,
so I'm widening the net.

    I'm running FreeBSD 6-STABLE, cvsupped as of last night.  I upgraded
the ports collection to X.org 6.9 at the same time.  Under the X
that ships with 6-RELEASE, in the ISO image, and under X.org 6.9,
the symptoms are the same.

    The hardware is an Athlon 4400+ CPU on an Asus motherboard and an
NVIDIA 7800 GTX video card.

    I'm not running the NVidia FreeBSD driver (yet), preferring to see
the VESA work first before stirring the pot.  If I run X -probeonly,
I get a message that "module fbdev cannot be found".  This message
is, however, almost unreadable because the probing of the video
card causes the console contrast to drop almost to zero.  The room
has to be almost pitch-black before the remaining dim text can be
read.  I have to reboot the machine to make the console brightness
and contrast normal again.

    Any takers on either of these problems?

Mike O'Brien


------- End of Forwarded Message

Mike O'Brien wrote:
>     I sent this to "freebsd-x11" and didn't hear a peep back,
> so I'm widening the net.
> 
>     I'm running FreeBSD 6-STABLE, cvsupped as of last night.  I
upgraded
> the ports collection to X.org 6.9 at the same time.  Under the X
> that ships with 6-RELEASE, in the ISO image, and under X.org 6.9,
> the symptoms are the same.
> 
>     The hardware is an Athlon 4400+ CPU on an Asus motherboard and an
> NVIDIA 7800 GTX video card.
> 
>     I'm not running the NVidia FreeBSD driver (yet), preferring to see
> the VESA work first before stirring the pot.  If I run X -probeonly,
> I get a message that "module fbdev cannot be found".  This
message
> is, however, almost unreadable because the probing of the video
> card causes the console contrast to drop almost to zero.  The room
> has to be almost pitch-black before the remaining dim text can be
> read.  I have to reboot the machine to make the console brightness
> and contrast normal again.
> 
>     Any takers on either of these problems?
> 
> Mike O'Brien
It might be worth trying the nvidia drivers even if VESA isn't working. 
  My personal experience with the very recent FreeBSD nvidia drivers is 
that they are awesome.

> From: mikeobrien@spamcop.net (Mike O'Brien)
> Date: Thu, 26 Jan 2006 07:44:43 -0800
> Sender: owner-freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
> 
>     I sent this to "freebsd-x11" and didn't hear a peep back,
> so I'm widening the net.
> 
>     I'm running FreeBSD 6-STABLE, cvsupped as of last night.  I
upgraded
> the ports collection to X.org 6.9 at the same time.  Under the X
> that ships with 6-RELEASE, in the ISO image, and under X.org 6.9,
> the symptoms are the same.
> 
>     The hardware is an Athlon 4400+ CPU on an Asus motherboard and an
> NVIDIA 7800 GTX video card.
> 
>     I'm not running the NVidia FreeBSD driver (yet), preferring to see
> the VESA work first before stirring the pot.  If I run X -probeonly,
> I get a message that "module fbdev cannot be found".  This
message
> is, however, almost unreadable because the probing of the video
> card causes the console contrast to drop almost to zero.  The room
> has to be almost pitch-black before the remaining dim text can be
> read.  I have to reboot the machine to make the console brightness
> and contrast normal again.
I have the same chipset and CPU on an MSI mobo and had exactly the same
problem. Right down to the very low contrast video. I think VESA is
broken with this chipset.

I installed nvidia-driver and nvidia-xconfig. It worked
immediately. nvidia-xconfig modifies the existing xorg.conf (or
XF85Config) to work with the nvidia driver.
-- 
R. Kevin Oberman, Network Engineer
Energy Sciences Network (ESnet)
Ernest O. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab)
E-mail: oberman@es.net			Phone: +1 510 486-8634

I did get X.org running on 6-STABLE.  As you have mentioned,
starting X via "X -probeonly" with an Asus SLI motherboard and an
NVidia 7800 GTX video card fails multiply; the internal configuration
tries and fails to load module "fbdev", meanwhile, the probe of the
card dials the contrast of the syscons consoles down to near-zero levels.

	However, running "Xorg -configure" succeeds where the other
fails.  All modules are loaded, an x.conf file is written and the
contrast is not blown.  On my system, the monitor is able to support
the highest resolution specified in the configuration file, though the
text is unreadably small.

	Therefore, modulo tuning of the acceptable modes, X is now
working on this configuration.  Thanks for all your help!

Mike O'Brien