Bluescreen crash / DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL

Since upgrading to 0.6.0 / 0.6.1, I've been blue screening pretty often (about 5 times already tonight in as many hours).

The message on the blue screen is:
DRIVER_IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL


My config:

AMD Athlon 1.4ghz
1gig ram
Windows 2k Pro
GeForce3 (most recent nVidia drivers)
SB!Live Platinum

You're running into a driver error of some type.

Check out this article: http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=http://support.microsoft.com:80/support/kb/articles/Q244/6/17.ASP&NoWebContent=1 which will give you instructions on how to modify your registry to determine which driver is failing.

From what I've read on other forums, most likely it's the video card and you might have to modify some of your settings.

Yeah. It only started happening in client 0.6.1. After a while I re-installed 0.6.0 again but it was still happening. I'll mess around with it tonight I guess. It only seemed to happen in insanely busy areas, and The Outlands was pretty bumpin' last night.

Went back to the nVidia 41.09 drivers and am still getting this problem. It's only been occuring since I installed version 0.6.0/0.6.1.

Blue screens are no fun!

Dee-

This isn't meant to insult your intelligence, however, I have to ask: Between installing .60 and .61 did you install any other program, device or modify any of your existing hardware?

From what i read in the article and come of the troubleshooting tips, its not necessarily the driver per se, but rather how the driver might handle something (changing the Open GL settings within the driver properties or any of the other settings. Especially if you have the Nvidia QuickTweak installed in your systray, you may have moved a setting in that which caused this and I'm sure the Lindens would want to know that part.

Hey, Deeblue -

Do you know what the name of the driver/file that caused the bluescreen? That would be very helpful in terms of figuring out which particular device driver caused the issue, the fact that it's an IRQ issue screams device driver.

Also, the increase in crashes may be a result of the greatly increased user density - since we've had quite a few more people on the servers in the last few days in the outlands, our rendering engine has sometimes had to go to a fallback "mixed-mode" rendering mode, where we're using both AGP and non-AGP for rendering, since we've run out of AGP memory for geometry. It's possible that this is tripping something in your system's AGP drivers that wasn't being triggered before.

One thing you can try to do is to verify if your system is stable in non-AGP rendering mode (you can toggle it in real-time under Preferences/Display, first check box). With lots of people on the server, it's possible that you'll find that it's actually faster right now to run in non-AGP mode, as the cost of switching modes mid-render right now is rather high.

If the system IS more stable this way, you might want to see if your motherboard has new AGP drivers, or if your chipset manufacturer has new AGP drivers. It's an AMD, so I'd lay pretty good odds that it's a VIA chipset - which DEFINITELY benefits from AGP driver upgrades if you haven't done one before.

In the future, this will hopefully be less of a problem, as we're going to work on the AGP memory usage issue - however, the usual engineering caveats apply - there's always another nifty "Ack, we have to fix this NOW!" bug popping up.

- Doug

PS. BTW, have you been sending in your viewer crash reports? I haven't seen any from you in the last couple of days. If it hasn't been popping up, let me know, too - that's a DIFFERENT bug.

Raven...

Nope. No new anything in between 0.5.* and 0.6.*

Over time I've learned that once you get a semi-stable system, you really shouldn't mess with it any more than is absolutely necessary, haha. If it works I generally leave it alone.



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Doug...

Sorry, don't know the name of the driver at this point. I have to say that the desire to get back into SL immediately was far stronger than my desire to find out exactly what's causing the crash, haha. I know it's related to the graphics card in some way. SL has such intense graphics needs.

I should have mentioned also that pretty much every bluescreen occured when there was a ton of people everywhere. Mainly it happened when I was just trying to fly to another location, but had to go past a lot of people. I think it's only happened once so far when it was only a handful of people on my home sim (currently Stanford).

As for the motherboard, yep it's a VIA! Guh... Never again, haha.. the next system I build will definitely be Intel based. I was a fool for even straying from them in the first place.

Anyway... Motherboard bios was recently patched. AGP drivers were also updated even more recently. Originally SL was running very slowly for me, which was when I noticed that I had forgotten to update the AGP stuff after re-installing Win2k a couple of months ago. So SL actually reminded me to update the AGP struff.

And, yep, I'm guilty. I haven't been filling out the crash report as often as I should. I honestly felt that I didn't know enough about what was going on at the time to send something off. How do the reports generally work? I assume it gathers some info about my system and sends that off along with my text report? I'll be sure and fill one out the next time this happens.


So anyway last night went something like this:

Bluescreened. Got mad, rebooted, reloaded SL.

Bluescreened again later. Did same thing. Went and quickly read through the page that Raven posted a link to. Decided that it looked too much like hard work for a Friday night when all I wanted to do was relax and enjoy some SL. Also remembering that any time in the past I've decided to make some seemingly "simple" modifications to Windows, it always ends up in me having to reinstall Windows. So not wanting to jinx a semi-good thing, I left it alone.

Bluescreened again. Reverted back to old nVidia 41.09 drivers.

Bluescreened again. Turned down some settings, turned off anti-aliasing, set it more for stability than performance, etc, etc.

Bluescreened again. Getting really mad by this point. Decided I'd try a different approach. Re-installed the latest nVidia drivers. Turned anti-aliasing back on, set it back to performance settings. Increased SL's res from 1024 x 768 to 1280 x 1024. Turned on every gfx option available. Changed drawing distance from 256 to 140. I also noticed that the card was only running at AGP 2x, so I edited my bios and flipped that back to 4x.

Strangely enough, after doing that I was flying around and things seemed ok. I later edited SL gfx settings again and only left on AGP, local lighting and shadows. Running a bit faster, and still seemed stable. Granted there were less people online by then, so I haven't had a real chance to test things out. I did do some flying around Jessie also, which was busy the whole night long, and I seemed fine there. At the end of my night after hanging out by the CyberCity project area, I flew back across the entire world back to Stanford and was still doing fine. It seems to be ok (famous last words).

I do remember reading somewhere that the GeForce3 cards performed better at higher resolutions, so I'm wondering if the change up has kicked in something else which is helping? Who knows.





I guess tonight if I bluescreen again, I'll try turning off AGP (*cry*) and see if it helps stability at least. (Trying not to think of how slow 0.5.* was before I clicked that AGP wasn't enabled).




I'll let ya know.

don't knock VIA! imho (and in the opinion of many other veteran system builders), VIA has some of the best chipsets available on the market, in terms of price, performance, and stability. my last four systems have all been VIA-based, and all but one system (AMD 760MP chipset for a server) i've built for other people in the past two years have been VIA-based. not a single problem with any of the machines has been motherboard-related. (in fact, 95% of the problems stem from using second-rate peripherals when the budget's getting too tight )

the biggest caveats with using VIA are drivers, drivers, drivers, and drivers. oh, did i mention drivers? get the latest 4-in-1's (now called hyperion) from http://www.viaarena.com and install it all, and i can guarantee yer system will run like a champion.

if, after all this, you're still against via, that doesn't mean your only alternative is intel.

SiS makes chipsets for both AMD and Intel processors, and nVidia's nForce2 chipset (AMD CPU) is giving the VIA KT400A chipset a hard run for it's money.

if you like intel processors, feel free to use 'em, i just don't want you turning from AMD because you had a bad chipset experience. personally, i'm rather unbiased when it comes to processors; i've just been using AMD because they're cheaper... intel's getting more price-competitive, so i may have to look into a P4-based system a few months from now, unless the Athlon64 grabs my attention first

oh, and one last thing about chipsets/motherboards: board manufacturer has a LOT to do with board stability. for example, the ECS boards sold at Fry's suck. really. i used to work @ Fry's, and at least 10% of the ECS boards that were sold came back to the returns dept. as defective. my personal favorite manufacturer right now is Asus. my last two boards have been Asus, and have treated me VERY well. Asus has a reputation for stability, performance, features, and quick fixing when problems do occur. unfortunately you're going to pay a premium for this quallity, as an Asus board will generally run $20-$30 more than a similarly-equipped board from another manufacturer. i've also heard good things about Abit, Gigabyte, and Albatron (i've also built one system with an Albatron, and it almost rivals my Asus system with the same specs), so you may want to look into one of those if you're upgrading soon...
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regarding your bluescreens, the next time you get one, take the time to skim through it. somewhere, it should mention the driver name. although you seem to have nailed it correctly as a gfx problem (being that they seem to have gone away by fiddling with gfx-related settings), it won't hurt to confirm it by driver name.