[Beowulf] NVidia woes

[Sellers, William A. (LARC-D205)[NCI INFORMATION SYSTEMS]]

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/