Attention: Proprietary video driver users (ATI, Nvidia, etc.)

[Jack Tanner]

This sounds like an incredibly useful thing to have in the release notes 
for FC5, perhaps in abbreviated form.

CC'ing relnotes@ as per instructions at 
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/DocsProject/ReleaseNotes/Process

Mike A. Harris wrote:
> There have been a number of bugs reported in Red Hat bugzilla against
> X which have recently been tracked down to 3rd party video drivers being
> the culprit behind the problem the user was experienced.  In many of the
> cases however, it wasn't obvious that the 3rd party drivers were at
> fault because the user was actually using the Red Hat supplied drivers,
> and not using the 3rd party driver that they had previously installed.
> 
> Since I've wasted at least 6-8 hours in the last month diagnosing issues
> of this nature which have later turned out to be caused by proprietary
> drivers having been "installed" on the system, wether they were actually
> being *used* or not, I thought I should write a short useful
> informational email on the topic to the lists to try and inform people
> of some pitfalls you may encounter if you even _install_ 3rd party
> video drivers.
> 
> Both ATI and Nvidia, and perhaps even other 3rd party drivers out there
> come in some form of tarball or equivalent form from the particular
> vendor.  Most users seem to favour the hardware vendor supplied drivers
> directly, rather than using more sanely packaged 3rd party packages that
> contain the same drivers.  This is very unfortunate, because installing
> these 3rd party tarball driver installations is very harmful to your
> clean OS installation.
> 
> Both ATI and Nvidia's proprietary video driver installation utilities
> replace the Red Hat supplied libGL library with their own libGL.
> Nvidia's driver installs a replacement libglx.a X server module,
> removing the Red Hat supplied X.Org module in the process.  ATI's
> driver may or may not replace libglx.a with it's own, I haven't checked
> (but if someone could confirm that, I'd appreciate knowing for certain).
> 
> Once you have either of these drivers installed on your system, you
> can no longer use DRI with any video card.  So if you install the
> ATI fglrx driver, while you should still be able in theory at least
> to use the Red Hat supplied radeon driver, you may no longer be able
> to use DRI with the radeon driver, because ATI's driver has blown away
> critical files that come with the OS that are needed for proper
> operation.
> 
> If you install Nvidia's driver, and later decide to install an ATI
> card, and still have Nvidia's driver installed, bang - you will not
> be able to get Red Hat supplied DRI 3D acceleration to work.  You must
> remove Nvidia's driver completely from your hard disk, and completely
> reinstall all of the xorg-x11 and mesa packages, and ensure they are
> all intact by using:
> 
> rpm -Va
> 
> Another problem being reported by a few people, is they are unable to
> get DRI to work because mesa libGL is looking for the DRI drivers in
> the wrong directory.  The claim is that mesa is looking for the DRI
> drivers in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules.
> 
> On a fresh OS install however, my findings are that mesa's libGL very
> much is not looking in /usr/X11R6 for it's modules.  It is looking in
> the proper location of /usr/lib/dri for the modules.  Why then is it
> looking in the wrong place on some systems?
> 
> Answer:  Because of fglrx having been installed.  If you have had a
> previous OS release installed, and have installed ATI's fglrx driver
> from tarball, it has removed the OS supplied libGL et al and made
> backup copies of them aparently.  Now you do an OS upgrade which works
> properly and installs everything in the right place.  Then you uninstall
> ATI's fglrx with whatever script or whatever they supply, and now you
> try to run X, and get no DRI!
> 
> Well, since you don't have fglrx installed at all, it must be our
> OS at fault right!  Wrong.  the uninstall script has put the OLD
> libGL it backed up (from FC4 or whatever) back in the system,
> overwriting the new FC5 supplied libGL in the process, and since
> ATI's fglrx driver is DRI based as well, it looks for the DRI
> modules in the wrong place now.
> 
> Conclusions:
> If you are going to use any 3rd party proprietary drivers, please do
> yourself and everyone else a huge favour, and at least get your
> drivers from reputable 3rd party rpm package repositories such as
> livna.org which packages both the nvidia and ati proprietary drivers
> in rpm packages which install the drivers sanely without overwriting
> Red Hat/Fedora supplied files.  These 3rd party packages install
> the files in alternative locations, and configure the X server et al.
> appropriately so that everything works.  Since they do not blow
> away OS supplied files, you can use the OS supplied drivers still
> by reconfiguring xorg.conf.  Also, if you decide to uninstall the
> 3rd party drivers via rpm, they just go away and cause no further
> harm to the system.  So PLEASE USE THIRD PARTY RPM PACKAGES if you
> _must_ use 3rd party drivers.  It helps create world peace.
> 
> If you choose to install ATI or Nvidia tarball/whatever drivers
> directly from ATI/Nvidia (or any other vendor for that matter), your
> system is 100% completely and totally unsupported.  Even if you are
> using _our_ drivers, your 3rd party driver installation may have
> blown away our libGL, our libglx.a or any other files that have been
> supplied by our OS.  As such, your system is not supported.
> 
> For those who encounter a bug of any kind whatsoever while using
> 3rd party video drivers, completely remove the 3rd party drivers
> from your system, and then perform a full "yum update" to ensure
> you have the latest Fedora Core supplied X packages installed.  After
> doing this, do an "rpm -Va" of your whole system, in particular the
> xorg-x11-*, mesa-* and lib* packages.  If there are any discrepancies
> found in any of the Fedora supplied packages, in particular in libGL,
> or the X server packages, remove them and reinstall them and reverify
> that the files installed on your system are the ones shipped by
> Fedora.
> 
> If you are able to reproduce the problem you are having after having
> performed these steps, and having ensured that you are neither using
> 3rd party drivers, nor even have them installed, then feel free to
> file a bug report in bugzilla.
> 
> By doing this small amount of pre-diagnosis of your own system if
> you are using 3rd party drivers, you will save yourself a lot of
> headaches, and will save other people, including developers such
> as myself from wasting endless hours trying to diagnose problems
> which turn out to be bogus.  Hours which could have been spent
> fixing legitimate bugs that are present in bugzilla.
> 
> As an additional note - if anyone is using proprietary drivers and
> has any problems which they believe might actually be a bug in
> Xorg and not in their proprietary driver - file such bugs directly
> in X.Org bugzilla.  X.Org has an nVidia (closed) component specifically
> for the proprietary driver, and Nvidia engineers get those bugs and
> will investigate them over time.
> 
> Anyhow, I hope this helps people understand at least some of the
> problems that can occur when you opt to using 3rd party drivers,
> present some alternatives, and to help people diagnose their own
> problems which might be caused by having installed 3rd party
> drivers.
> 
> Thanks for reading.
> TTYL
> 
> 
> P.S. Feel free to forward this email on to any other lists or
> people whom you think might benefit from it.  Also, if anyone thinks
> this information would be useful to have on the Fedora Wiki or
> somewhere else, feel free to copy my email into a wiki page, or
> paraphrase, etc.
> 
> 
>