[lug] NVIDIA accelerated graphics

[Steve A Hart]

Thanks everyone, I'll give all these ideas a shot.

cheers

Steve

On 10/18/2010 04:09 PM, Simos wrote:
> 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 but it's usually way out of date),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

-- 
Steve Hart
Systems Administrator
Colorado Center for Astrodynamics Research
University of Colorado Boulder
shart at colorado.edu
(303)492-8109