Re: NVidia driver status

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Tue, Jan 30, 2007 at 04:43:48PM +0100, Petersson, Mats wrote:
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com 
> > [mailto:xen-devel-bounces@lists.xensource.com] On Behalf Of 
> > Jacob Gorm Hansen
> > Sent: 30 January 2007 15:33
> > To: xen-devel
> > Subject: [Xen-devel] NVidia driver status
> > 
> > hi,
> > 
> > being dissapointed a bit by ATI's support for Xen, I just purchased a
> > top-of-the-line Dell box with an expensive NVidia graphics card, as
> > rumour said they would work better than the ATI ones. 
> > Unfortunately, the
> > NVidia installer detects that I am running Xen, and then refused to
> > compile the kernel module, saying that Xen is not supported. 
> > Does anyone
> > know of a way around this check, or have fresh experiences getting Xen
> > and NVidia to play together?
> 
> Now, there may be calls to say that I'm biased here, but I'm really not
> working with the ATI-side of AMD anyways, so: 
> 
> The reason it refuses to compile the kernel module is probably more to
> do with the fact that the guys at nVidia KNOWS that it's not going to
> work anyways. If that's the case, it's not really much point in
> bypassing the check itself. 

It works just fine on Xen kernels from what I can tell. There are 3rd
party YUM repos which provide pre-compiled nvidia modules which work 
with the Fedora Xen kernels. 

  $ uname -r
  2.6.19-1.2895.fc6xen
  $ cat /proc/modules | grep nvidia
  nvidia 7760984 32 - Live 0xffffffff8826b000 (P)

Now perhaps the RPM has been patched to make it compile on Xen, or perhaps
it is just a bug in the installer script, but it does look like it works. 
In either case one should file support requests with NVidia directly since 
it is a closed source driver which means open source developers can't do much
(if anything) to debug problems without risking getting tainted by/violating 
the licensing terms.

Dan.
-- 
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  +1 978 392 2496 -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-               Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=|