[Beowulf] NVidia woes

[Robert G. Brown]

On Sun, 12 Apr 2009, Joe Landman wrote:

> 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).

The Nvidia drivers used to be in livna.  They still appear to be in
rpm-fusion (for at least F10).  Can't you use that?

    rgb

>
>  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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Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rgb at phy.duke.edu