I recently installed 11.4 on an older cpu (6 - 7years old). Initial install ran fine, box up and running fine. However, after an update (first after initial install), I could not get any graphic to work.
Looking through the logs etc, I found a msg from the kernel complaining “reserve_memtype failed…”.
Recent kernels use x86 PAT (Page Attribute Table) support enabled by default. When I disabled this with the option “nopat” on the boot command options, all was well again.
Why the initial kernel was ok with my old box but the update not is unclear but I post this in case people think it’s a problem with the nVidia driver - it’s not.
Thanks for letting us know about this as it could be helpful to another person with an older computer. I had to look it up to see what it means. Here is the kernel load option meaning and a link for a PAT.
nopat = [X86] Disable PAT (page attribute table extension of pagetables) support.
Just a footnote - this tweak fixed the same symptoms on my old HP Pavilion xv5000 laptop, with an AMD “Athlon XP 3000” CPU and NVIDIA “GeForce 4 420 Go 32M” graphics. Found this thread googling for “reserve_memtype”. Running 11.4 (32 bit) with kernel 2.6.37.6-0.7 when the problem struck.
Don’t forget to put it in /etc/sysconfig/bootloader if you want it to persist through kernel updates (but maybe it won’t be necessary at some point in the future?)