************** Many people have had problems with NVIDIA drivers and Fedora. I haven't seen a solution to my problem.
Right now, I post from a working install of Fedora 2, running a 2.6.9-1.6_FC2 prebuilt kernel. After many hours of researching why xorg.conf setting nvAGP failed under "1" (NVIDIA internal AGP) but succeeded under "3" (agpgart) I determined that Fedora developers compiled agpgart into the kernel, for whatever reason. Going monolithic seems to defeat the purpose of modules, and they should know that people might want to use NVIDIA's AGP, to compare the feel and performance.
Somewhat angry, I spent many hours trying to compile both this kernel and 2.6.5-1.358. My primary goal was to be able to use NVIDIA's internal AGP, instead of the kernel.. My secondary goal was to see how a stripped down kernel would perform. There are many things compiled into those kernels that I don't need for a modest system: AMD XP 1800, 384 MB RAM, cheap legacy GeForce2 MX/MX 400
Bottom line: all attempts to build a kernel with running AGP support failed. The modules seem to build. The NVIDIA drivers build (6629, 6610) But AGP won't initialize!! When AGP support is built as module, it fails. I get X, but no proc/status list of success. It also fails, to my horror, with agpgart built-into the custom kernel. Supposedly like the pre-made kernels avaliable at the Fedora web site.
This is extremely frustrating. I've seen plenty of heated discussion on the message boards across the internet. But nothing that addresses this. There is a serious crediblity issue if you can't recompile a kernel (given all the pre-req compilers and standard instructions for compiling kernels) The custom kernels I made were blazingly fast, and small. I left out things that I didn't need. Linux installs are supposed to have that flexiblity.
I have to tools and instructions to build a kernel. I used the .config from the pre-made Fedora kernels that have "working" AGP (never using NVIDIA's internal system, but kernel agpgart) Asside from leaving out totally irrelevant modules and features, my only deviation from those configs was to config for AMD K-6 (instead of "Pentium Pro" under xconfig) I don't have a Pentium. This should have been safe.
Does anyone know why the sources seem broken with respect to AGP?
I'm willing to forgive being forced to use agpgart if I could run a stripped down Fedora kernel. All the other features worked, the boot speed was FAST, and the RAM imprint was 30-40 MB less (a huge decrease)
Were the released, prebuilt kernels rigged in undocumented ways to get NVIDIA AGP support working?
Why would home builds (using similar tools and the *included* .config) fail to reproduce what I'm running now?
Any hints would be greatly appreciated.
It's a shame to be stuck using bloated kernels after using those speedy, lightweight builds.
