[lug] NVIDIA accelerated graphics

[Simos]

On Monday 18 October 2010 02:06:13 pm Steve A Hart wrote:
> Just curious if anyone has seen behavior like this.  I have multiple 
> RHEL 5 clients configured identically but with varying hardware.  Most 
> have various NVIDIA based graphics cards in them and for each I have the 
> latest NVIDIA driver installed and running.
> 
> What I'm seeing is that various systems suddenly have the accelerated 
> graphics turned off.  The systems did not reboot, but X may have 
> restarted overnight.  These also did not happen at the same time.  I'll 
> see one system with it not running, then the next day another system 
> will be the same way.  At most, I saw about 10 of my 50 RHEL clients 
> turn off the accelerated graphics with no apparent cause.
> 
> I basically have to go into single user and re-run the NVIDIA installer 
> to get the accelerated graphics back.
> 
> Not sure what the heck is happening but it appears to be happening more 
> frequently.  Just looking for ideas......
> 
> Thanks
> 
> Steve

Steve,

If RedHat is anything like Debian, what's most likely happening is that there
was an update to the standard RHEL X Server (or a related package) which
overwrote some of the custom NVIDIA installation. In Debian, at least, the OS
knows nothing about my NVIDIA driver since the latter is installed "outside"
of the standard Debian package system (using the custom NVIDIA installer).

So every so often, Debian updates my X packages because of some security
issue and overwrites my NVIDIA installation. I typically notice this when I try to
run something that uses OpenGL, and then I have to turn off X, drop into the
console, and rerun the NVIDIA installer (which is what you're doing as well).

If you don't want to do this, there may be:

1. An actual RHEL package of the NVIDIA driver that you may be able to
install instead of running the NVIDIA installer itself (I know Debian has this,
but it's usually way out of date),

2. A way to "pin" (or "divert" in Debian lingo) some of the conflicting files
(such as the X server binary) so that they don't get overwritten when X is
updated.

In my case, I chose to live with it since I only have four Debian boxes so
it's not a huge hassle to manually run the NVIDIA installer every time this
happens (also, Debian doesn't update their X server very often).

Hope this helps,

Regards,

Simos