"NVidia is great!" - Umm, no?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 31, 2007 at 11:52:44AM -0400, Giles Orr wrote:
> This is a rant against the state of Linux video support.  Feel free to
> stop reading now.

Well nice rant on the state of hardware makers not releasing specs.

> I recently purchased a NVidia video card, an XFX GeForce 6800 XTreme -
> AGP 8X, 256Mb DDR3 dual DVI.  Why isn't quite clear because I'm not a
> gamer, but it's a dual head card and I like things to run smoothly.  I
> bought it because fans of Open Source pretty much uniformly told me
> that NVidia products were really good, the way to go for high end
> video.  I beg to differ.

I run a 6600GT which is also dual head DVI and probably much cheaper (if
they still made them).

> NVidia users have to choose between two X drivers: the Open Source
> "nv" driver, and the binary-only "nvidia" driver.  As I said, I'm not
> much of a gamer so I figured the "nv" driver would be fine: with a
> card this powerful, even the relatively slow OS driver would produce
> good effect, right?  So I set the card up and everything went well
> until I started trying to run Xinerama.  X failed repeatedly, no
> matter how I massaged xorg.conf, telling me:
> 
>    Fatal server error:
>    Requested Entity already in use!
> 
> It took several days before I finally found a very small statement in
> someone's mailing list archive that the "nv" driver doesn't support
> dual head.  Sounds like it never has and possibly never will.  So here
> I am with two lovely LCD monitors I expected to run with my awesome
> new NVidia card, and unable to do so with the free driver.  I had
> avoided the "nvidia" driver not so much because I'm an OS fanatic
> (although I prefer to avoid proprietary software), but because
> installing it requires digging into the kernel.  There's a major
> problem here from my point of view: every time Debian upgrades the
> kernel I'm either going to have to stick with the old kernel or
> recompile a part of the support system for NVidia's proprietary
> driver, and quite possibly download a new version of the binary blob.
> Which is more likely to be kept up to date?  The OS "nv" driver -
> history has shown this.
> 
> So I dug in and tried to get the "nvidia" driver working.  As of
> kernel version 2.6.20, the kernel developers are going out of their
> way to make it difficult to use proprietary binary blobs in the kernel
> to avoid "tainting."  The compile kept aborting with the message:
> 
>    FATAL: modpost: GPL-incompatible module nvidia.ko uses GPL-only symbol
>    'paravirt_ops'

That was a mistake and fixed in 2.6.22.  The nvidia drivers use usleep,
which accidentally ended up depending on a GPL only symbol when
paravirt_ops were added and enabled.  2.6.22 fixed that so that usleep
doesn't accidentally become GPL only anymore.

> All of this makes me remember my Matrox G400 with considerable
> fondness.  It was a good card.  Yes, it uses a binary blob, but no
> recompiles, just move the blob in with the modules every time you
> upgraded the kernel, and off you went.  <sigh>  Hell, even the ATI
> card I had prior to this was easier to get running.  If Torvalds is to
> be believed, Intel is the way to go (for non-gamers, anyway).  But ...
> do they even make add-on video cards?  I know them only for onboard
> video.  How about dual head?  I really love my dual head.

No currently intel in integrated only.

> This is definitely a place where Linux does NOT "just work."  I ain't
> defecting to Windows or anything like that, but I really, really, wish
> this all worked better.

Well if none of the companies that make dual head cards are willing to
release specs, what can anyone do?

> While I admit that I wrote this primarily so I could vent, I'd be
> pleased to hear anyone else on the subject - better choices, things I
> missed, even "you're an idiot" - so long as it's backed up by solid
> logic.  Thanks for "listening."

Personally I run Debian with the proprietary nvidia drivers (from
debian's non-free archive section).  When a new kernel comes out,
generally all I have to do is: m-a a-i -t nvidia, and then I am all set
again.  For stable releases the binary modules will already be provided
built for the kernel and can simply be installed.  I also only run one
monitor at a time (at least for now).

--
Len Sorensen
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