3D Support for NVIDIA

[Angel]

Alan,how did u build the nVidia driver via the install script?




Dean S. Messing wrote:
> Alan wrote:
> : Well, that depends on what you used and how you built it.
> : 
> : I have been using the nVIDIA driver for a very long time.  I build the
> : driver via the install script. I do not use the
> : Livna/FreshRPMS/whatever RPM kernel module. (I have tried.  Will
> : explain later.)
> : 
> : If you build the nVIDIA driver and then update X components that use
> : 3d acceleration, using an OpenGL program can crash your X server.  It
> : is not a kernel panic, but sure as hell looks like one.  The solution
> : is to rebuild the kernel driver (and replace the Mesa/3d code) every
> : time X gets updated via Yum.  (I also start in init level 3, but I am
> : old...)
> : 
> : I have also seen problems with lockups with older hardware and the
> : legacy drivers using the Livna RPM on x86_64.  (My laptop has a 440go
> : chipset.) I solved this by going back to the "build by hand" method.
> : 
> : The only time I have seen kernel panics with the nVIDIA drivers, it
> : was not nVIDIA's fault.  I had a dual core Athlon system that had
> : undervoltage 4x AGP. If you had the motherboard set to 4x AGP, it
> : would flake every once in a while.  It did not matter if it was Linux
> : or Windows either.  (That ate up over a month of my life too. It was a
> : royal pain to find the cause.)
> : 
> : There is one valid point that has been brought up.  If you do get
> : kernel panics and the kernel developers and you mention that you are
> : using the closed source drivers, they will use it as an excuse to deny
> : coverage. (As well as vent hostility.)  I can understand their point
> : to an extent, but it is not helpful getting the problem solved.
> : Unless you can show that the fault is in the driver, then it is just
> : an excuse to get out of looking at the problem.  (Kind of like the
> : kind of answers you get if you call Stream's tech support.)
>
> Thanks, Alan, for these clarifying points.  My point was that lots of
> people (who don't have "religious issues" with running binary drivers)
> will help you if you choose to run them.  In my case the author of the
> driver helped me on a number of occasions when I had sticky situations
> I needed to solve.  He taught me how to control the type of scaling
> and centering the driver does so I could get it to drive a 1366x768
> panel my company makes which, at the time, even windows machines could
> not drive at native resolution. He made valuable suggestions on how to
> get it to frame-sync to the vertical blanking pulse so I could get
> perfect frame synchronisation---a must for psychophysics experiments.
> And he pointed me to the marvelous ReadMe that comes with the binary
> driver.  Many others on the lists have helped me too.
>
> On the other hand you are certainly right, that the kernel maintainers
> will turn a deaf ear to you if your kernel crashes and you are running
> the binary driver.  They are religious zealots.  And frankly, in most
> cases, I'm glad they are else the kernel would be a mess.  But for
> ordinary users to be pure OSS zealots is, to me, just silly.  I'm not
> about to throw out VMware or nVidia or scilab (which is OSS but not
> GNU) or any of the other myriad subsystems I run for a non-issue like
> "GNU purity".
>
> Regarding the use of nVidia from livna, my limited experience (about a
> year) has been that they are good at providing both the kernel and the
> xorg modules and extensions.  On my system I have
>
> kmod-nvidia-100.14.19-1.2.6.23.8_34.fc7.x86_64
> xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-100.14.19-3.lvn7.x86_64
>
> The former has a Build Date of 6th December 2007, the latter 12th
> October, so it seems livna keep up well.  You mention legacy hardware.
> My hardware is not too "legacy" so that may be what the difference is.
> Or it may be that I don't do any 3D work, which may tickle the
> problems you had.
>
> Anyway, apologies if I have misunderstood your reasons for not using a
> pre-compiled rpm.  For me they "just work".
>
> Dean
>
>
>