[Beowulf] NVidia woes

[Joe Landman]

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.

Hi William

   It is fairly easy to automate the installation of this (not 
necessarily using yum, though if you really want the nVidia drivers as 
an RPM package, by all means, it is possible ... and then yum will work).

   Is this of interest for Cuda/Nvidia users?  If so, what ABIs, and 
distros?

Joe
> 
> 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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-- 
Joseph Landman, Ph.D
Founder and CEO
Scalable Informatics LLC,
email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
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