Anyone have the Nvidia driver working in 2.6.11-1.14_FC3?

[Marc Schwartz]

Good evening everyone.

After all the back and forth on this issue, I decided to spend some time
researching the problem. Presumably these facts are known to others, but
hopefully it might help yet others.

I dropped to init 3, removed all vestiges of the nVidia drivers,
including the nv* files in /dev and /etc/udev/devices.

I then went back to the 6629 series nVidia installer to see if I could
localize the problems as being related to the nVidia drivers themselves
and not to any of the udev updates.

Curiously on the 2.6.11-1.14 kernel, the 6629 driver as downloaded
(without the patches available below), will not even install at all and
aborts the installation procedure. This is interesting, since it had
built without problem on earlier recent kernels, probably 2.6.10 series.

I searched on the nVidia discussion site and found the following sticky
thread:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=46676

which elucidates various problems and patches for the 6629 series
driver, which includes problems with udev.

There is a last post (by Zander, who works for nVidia) on that same
page, which references the Fedora udev page that I had referenced
earlier and the steps required to use the 6629 driver with udev.


I then went to the 7167 driver and it installed just fine. It also,
importantly, properly created the nv* files and associated permissions
in both /dev and /etc/udev/devices. I could run X immediately and the
configuration survived a re-boot without needing to reinstall the nVidia
driver.

There is a brief summary of the updates to the 7167 driver here:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_display_ia32_1.0-7167.html

which includes:

Improved compatibility with Linux 2.6 kernels.
Improved interaction with the udev filesystem.

So, it would seem that as of the 7167 series nVidia driver, the steps on
the Fedora udev page are no longer required.

This supports my earlier belief that the problem was nVidia's and not
Fedora's, which might explain why the Fedora udev page has not yet been
updated to reflect the fact that the steps are not required for nVidia
drivers >= 7167.

Bringing things up to date, I was able to replicate the 7167 udev
behavior with the 7174 nVidia driver, so things seem to be stable in so
far as udev device creation at this point.

I should note that all of the above were done with the 2.6.11-1.14_FC3
kernel and with udev-039-10.FC3.7.

Thus, this should isolate the behavior changes to the nVidia driver and
not udev.

I am copying Harald Hoyer and Bill Nottingham here, with the hope that
this information might be found useful and could be reflected on the
udev page to clarify the current status of the nVidia/udev interaction.

Best regards,

Marc Schwartz