[Beowulf] NVidia woes

[Franz Marini]

On Fri, 2009-04-10 at 12:29 -0500, Sellers, William A. (LARC-D205)[NCI
INFORMATION SYSTEMS] wrote:
> I wish NVIDIA would support yum.  NVidia, are you listening?  Keeping the kernel updated with the real nvidia driver is a pain, but needed is you run the real nvidia driver (like we do).  For those not experienced with RHEL and nvidia kernel modules, when you install a new kernel, you have to run the nvidia installer after the system boots under the new kernel to build the nvidia module for that kernel. Then a reboot gets it all working again.  Imagine doing that for 25 engineering workstations in a dept, and you'll get the idea.  Yum works great if you can live with the default 'nv' driver.

There is no need to reboot the machine after having installed the
driver. Moreover, you can easily check with a script at boot (before
runlevel 5, and so before X has been started) if the installed nvidia
module is compiled against the current running kernel, if not, you can
instruct nvidia-installer to recompile the kernel module against the
running kernel. After that, you only need to go on with the normal
startup sequence. When X is started, it will pick up the correct nvidia
driver.

I have a ten lines script which does exactly that for all our
workstations, and it works flawlessly. 

F.

 
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Franz Marini
Prof. R. A. Broglia Theoretical Physics of Nuclei,
      Atomic Clusters and Proteins Research Group
Dept. of Physics, University of Milan, Italy.
web   : http://merlino.mi.infn.it/proteins/
email : franz.marini at mi.infn.it
phone : +39 02 50317226
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