[Beowulf] NVidia woes
Sellers, William A. (LARC-D205)[NCI INFORMATION SYSTEMS]
w.a.sellers at nasa.gov
Fri Apr 10 10:29:51 PDT 2009
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.
Bill
-----Original Message-----
From: beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org [mailto:beowulf-bounces at beowulf.org] On Behalf Of Skylar Thompson
Sent: Friday, April 10, 2009 12:40 PM
To: Mark Hahn
Cc: Beowulf Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Beowulf] Repenting for sins against Dell (on good Friday, no less)
Mark Hahn wrote:
>> It's useful because it will automatically build and install existing
>> kernel modules for newly-installed kernels. Many vendors ship drivers
>> as RPMs separate from the kernel, so they won't get updated when the
>> kernel is updated unless you use something like dkms.
>
> interesting. the distro-based approach is that when you update your
> kernel, the package manager will naturally also update any packages
> which are dependent on the kernel version. that certainly works fine
> if you're using normal (binary, precompiled) packages. I guess the
> issue with rebuilding packages is that they are, in some sense,
> version-flexible (can be rebuilt for new kernels). the issue, though
> is that you don't know whether the package will still build for the
> new kernel until you try - it might have dependencies on a symbol that
> gets removed from the kernel update, for instance.
Right, although distributions like RHEL do a good job of keeping the kernel unchanged from an API perspective within a given release.
--
-- Skylar Thompson (skylar at cs.earlham.edu)
-- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/
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