Linu hardware stability guide Part 2分析和总结分析和总结.docxVIP

Disclaimer : Disclaimer : The original version of this article was first published on IBM developerWorks, and is property of Westtech Information Services. This document is an updated version of the original article, and contains various improvements made by the Gentoo Linux Documentation team. This document is not actively maintained. Linux hardware stability guide, Part 2 Content: Drivers The many causes of instability A stability problem is often not caused by defective hardware, but by improper hardware configuration or flaky drivers. My experience in this area began when I tried to get Linux working on my Diamond Viper V550, an NVIDIA TNT-based AGP card, using NVIDIAs own accelerated drivers. NVIDIA has their own display drivers for Linux, a collaboration between NVIDIA, SGI, and VA Linux. These drivers have a lot of advantages over the standard 2d-only NVIDIA drivers included with Xfree86 4.0. For one, they have full accelerated 3D support. Even better, they feature an official OpenGL 1.2 implementation, rather than just an enhanced version of Mesa. So, all in all, these accelerated drivers are the ones you want to be using if you own an NVIDIA-based graphics card, at least in theory. My attempt to get them working properly turned out to be an excellent learning experience, to say the least. After I installed the accelerated Linux NVIDIA drivers (see Resources later in this article), I started up Xfree86 and began playing around with all my 3D applications, now wonderfully accelerated as they should be. Up until that point, I had had to reboot into Windows NT in order to take advantage of 3D acceleration. Now, while I dont mind NT, having to reboot to use 3D apps was somewhat annoying, and I was glad to have one less reason to leave Linux and reboot my machine. However, after playing around for an hour or so, I experienced a fatal setback to my Linux 3D aspirations -- my machine locked up. My mouse simply stopped moving and the screen froze, and I had to rebo