headless Dell servers, Matrox

[Jeff Berry]

Following up ...

I've managed to get a workaround in place.  It's kind of horrible/clunky, but it seems to be doing the trick -

basically, I copied the mesa and GL libraries from a working version of ubuntu into an alternate location, and then set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH environment variable to point at it.

A side effect of this is that we can, if needed, put other versions of the libraries into other directories and point at them if people need it.  (Which they might, we have some legacy code ...)


Thanks for the input Matthew and Salvador,

Kind regards,

Jeff Berry, MRC CBU




From: Matthew Barron <freontrip at gmail.com>
Sent: 10 February 2025 17:40
To: Jeff Berry <Jeff.Berry at mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk>
Cc: mesa-users at lists.freedesktop.org
Subject: Re: headless Dell servers, Matrox

Hi Jeff,

Your questions are good. Let me try to answer them to the best of my knowledge.

1) Yes, almost certainly. The last Matrox cards with open drivers were based on the G450 and G550, which top out around OpenGL 1.3 or so. I am guessing (and admit I'm shooting from the hip here) that the integrated video is some kind of server motherboard-provided G200 IGP, which is very quaint by modern DRM standards and has been deprecated. I expect llvmpipe would deliver a more consistent experience now, if it wouldn't create too much CPU load. Was the OpenGL running a GUI compositor, or something more demanding?
2) Can't say that I have. Even cajoling the Matrox M9120 I played with for a while into cooperating with a modern-ish Linux distribution with closed drivers was a headache, and I haven't used a G400 in Linux in roughly 20 years.
3) You are probably at the leading edge of modern Matrox users dealing with these issues, unfortunately. But I hope I'm wrong and someone else here has better advice...

Best wishes,
Matt

On Mon, Feb 10, 2025 at 9:40 AM Jeff Berry <Jeff.Berry at mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk<mailto:Jeff.Berry at mrc-cbu.cam.ac.uk>> wrote:
Good afternoon,

I'm hoping this is a good place to seek some guidance.  We've got a set of Dell rack servers that we run headless.  We'd been using CentOS 7 and were able to get OpenGL running via vnc or x2go.  We are upgrading our cluster to Ubuntu 24, and now the OpenGL is not running.  After running around in circles and chasing down various leads, I suspect the problem is that mesa no longer supports the Matrox cards which the Dell racks are using.  (If someone has a better idea, I'd love to hear it!)   I can get OpenGL sort of working if I stick a bunch of old GL and  Mesa libs in a directory and set that up using LD_LIBRARY_PATH, but that's not ideal.  (And doesn't really work very well.)


The docs (https://docs.mesa3d.org/systems.html) say that Matrox  is deprecated but ' If anyone’s interested though, the code can be found in the Git repo.'

My questions are roughly:

1)      am I off base in thinking this is probably the issue?

a)       if so, what else should I be looking at?

2)      has anyone had a similar issue and tried to get the Matrox drivers built for later versions of Mesa

a)       if so, any pointers?

3)      more generally, are there pointers or docs on where to get the code and how to integrate it?  git is not something I use much, and although I had poke at it, I've not got a good idea of where to get the code.


Hoping that someone can point me in the right direction ...

Kind regards,
Jeff Berry, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit
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