RE: NVidia driver status

[Andres Lagar Cavilla <andreslc@cs.toronto.edu>]

My two cents,
Mats, what you say about DMA nastiness is right, and known workarounds 
exist. Athough not always reliable, probably the reason why Jacob tried 
switching vendors.
It is usually the case that the driver bundles can be unpacked to some 
temporary dir, i.e
sh <ati_installer.run> --keep
 From there you can selectively install the user level bits, patch the 
module to work with xen, and then build it.
If all fails, livna advertises a xen-compatible nvidia kernel module rpm 
for fedora. Unpack it and steal the kmod.
Andres

>Message: 5
>Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 16:43:48 +0100
>From: "Petersson, Mats" <Mats.Petersson@amd.com>
>Subject: RE: [Xen-devel] NVidia driver status
>To: "Jacob Gorm Hansen" <jacobg@diku.dk>,	"xen-devel"
>	<Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
>Message-ID:
>	<907625E08839C4409CE5768403633E0B018E190F@sefsexmb1.amd.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>  
>
>>-----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's quite common for (graphics) driver code to make "nasty" stuff with
>memory addresses, use DMA for all sorts of weird and wonderfull things,
>and in general do things that aren't "xen-friendly". Most other drivers,
>for example, won't put a memory address inside a DMA buffer, that refers
>to a different area of memory that may not even be a DMA buffer in
>itself. 
>
>Just as an idea for "tricking": have you run strace on the installer to
>see how it figures out that you're on a Xen kernel? Is it using some
>xm-tool, the kernel name (-xen) or some other method. You may be able to
>bypass it once you know how it works... ;-)
>
>--
>Mats
>  
>
>>Thanks,
>>Jacob
>>
>>
>>_______________________________________________
>>Xen-devel mailing list
>>Xen-devel@lists.xensource.com
>>http://lists.xensource.com/xen-devel
>>
>>
>>
>>    
>>
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
>
>Message: 6
>Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2007 15:46:47 +0000
>From: Keir Fraser <Keir.Fraser@cl.cam.ac.uk>
>Subject: Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] Clean up and fix errors in strncpy ->
>	strlcpy conversion
>To: Christoph Egger <Christoph.Egger@amd.com>,
>	<xen-devel@lists.xensource.com>
>Cc: Aron Griffis <aron@hp.com>, xen-ia64-devel@lists.xensource.com
>Message-ID: <C1E518E7.8156%Keir.Fraser@cl.cam.ac.uk>
>Content-Type: text/plain;	charset="US-ASCII"
>
>
>
>
>On 30/1/07 3:26 pm, "Christoph Egger" <Christoph.Egger@amd.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>>You're confusing the cleanups with the bugfixes.  Any use of
>>>safe_strcpy() in my patch was just cleanup.
>>>
>>>The bugfixes are on the signature fields (the first change quoted
>>>above), which I changed to use memcpy since strlcpy adds an unwanted
>>>NUL.
>>>      
>>>
>>Aron: If the above patch is still correct (against CS 13703), please resend it
>>for Keir to apply.
>>    
>>
>
>The original patch still applies cleanly to xen-unstable so I'll apply it
>without a resend.
>
> -- Keir
>
>
>
>
>
>------------------------------
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>End of Xen-devel Digest, Vol 23, Issue 227
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>  
>