nv question...

[Gene Heskett]

On Wednesday 28 February 2007, Colin Guthrie wrote:
>Gene Heskett wrote:
>> Thanks.  I knew it was 2d, or was when I last had an nvidia card, but
>> since I build my own kernels, ISTR I was building the nv driver as
>> part of the kernel tree, back at about the time RH switched from
>> XFree86 to the Xorg version over licensing squabbles.
>
>I personally don't recall this, but perhaps you are referring to a
>framebuffer driver? This is different to an X11 driver, unless you use
>directfb or similar.
>
Possibly, its been around 3 years since I switched to an ati card after an 
nvidia went south and crowbared something on the mobo doing it, so I had 
to rebuild from scratch at the time.   I did salvage the memory and cpu 
though, and they are now on another mobo, and running my milling machine 
just fine.  The newer Mach Speed mobo also run that old 1400 mhz athlon 
200 mhz faster than it did on the biostar board, AND it still runs below 
110F at full tilt.  It never ran less than 150F and often hit 175F when 
it was running at 1200mhz on that biostar board.  The diff?  
DamnedifIknow.

>> Now, someone mentioned that the dkms utility would build the nvidia
>> driver fresh, for the kernel that was being booted if it hadn't
>> already been built for the current kernel.  Is this true?  I have it
>> installed but no idea if its properly configured to do that.
>
>The proprietory nividia driver contains a kernel module along with
>updated GL libraries and an X11 driver too (they are all needed to make
>it work) and some distros (e.g. Mandriva) have packaged this up as a
>dkms package to allow for easy installation and upgrade. It's actually a
>lot more reliable to use the DKMS package than nvidia's installer which
>tends to rename certain core files that you may actually need under some
>circumstances.
>
>> In the instant case, this would be 2.6.20-ck1, but could be 2.6.21-rc2
>> by the time I stuff this card into the slot the ati is occupying now,
>> later tomorrow I think.  I've just rebuilt this kernel with everything
>> nvidia I could spot as modules, so hopefully the transition will be
>> relatively painless.  Hopefully as simple as replacing the card,
>> booting to runlevel 3 which I do anyway, and running
>> system-config-display.  But, I'm a personal friend (or enemy depending
>> on ones point of view) of that Murphy that wrote all those laws, so
>> who knows.

I've seen a couple of no-boots to rc2, so I'm going to wait for rc3 before 
I jump back on that bandwagon.

I have the card installed now, and running the nv driver (which is a dog, 
glxgears about 200fps, where the ati was doing 860, but that's not my 
instant concern, the achievable resolution is) and the EDID info from the 
monitor is telling it it cannot run at 1600x1200, which its been doing 
happily on the ati card for about 3 years now.  So I'm looking at the 
text of this message as I type it and finding I can read it from 10 feet 
away, positively huge at 1440x900 when I'm used to 1600x1200.  So right 
now I'm building a kernel w/o the DCC stuffs, so maybe I can reset it 
like I want.

>I think the only specific things would be agpgart related stuff? Someone
>could confirm this for me tho.
>
>FYI there is a new 3D open source driver called nouveau, which is
>currently under heavy development. It will hopefully be able to replace
>the blob in time.
>
This sounds like excellent news.  Thanks.

In the meantime, does anyone have a url for some modern setup instructions 
for dkmf?  That which I located with google last night were pretty 
uniformly for kernels back in the 2.6.12 region and I'm sure a lot has 
changed by now.

I do have the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9746-pkg1.run on site, but I understand 
there are some shallow shoals here where a sailor can run aground and get 
foundered.

So install advice, or urls to same, will be much appreciated.

>Col
>
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-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.