For the past several weeks, I had a strange problem. Sometimes when I booted my computer, it would refuse to start the X server and would give the following error in dmesg:
NVRM: not using NVAGP, kernel was compiled with GART_IOMMU support!!
NVRM: failed to allocate stack!
The weird thing about it is that normally if I rebooted the computer, it would magically work again. So this error only showed up once in a while and seemed to disappear at will. Today, it happened again, so I decided to fix it.
The first thing that I tried was disabling the GART_IOMMU option in the kernel. Unfortunately, it is now embedded in AMD64, so it can’t be easily disabled. So I opened up lynx (as I said, I had no X server) and googled around. Some other people experienced similar problems. In the NVIDIA forums, someone suggested adding iommu=noaperture to the kernel options at startup, or enlarging the aperture size in the BIOS. Changing the aperture size was suggested for a couple of other problems, and I remembered that at some point the agpgart complained about the aperture size.
I decided to change the aperture size. To do so, I entered the BIOS and pressed Ctrl+F1. This brought up some more advanced configuration options. The aperture size option was under “Advanced Chipset Options”; I changed it to 64MB and rebooted the computer.
Now everything seems to work properly. I just hope it was really solved and didn’t just accidentally work like in the past. The good thing is that I can’t see any errors from the NVIDIA driver in dmesg anymore.