https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=219456 ------- Comment #17 from aritger@nvidia.com 2006-12-21 16:11 MST -------
So NVIDIA is not interested in easy driver integration into Linux products? This is definitely bad news. :-(
I'm sorry for the miscommunication, Stefan. After all the great work SuSE and NVIDIA has done together, we both know the above statement isn't true. Several NVIDIA engineers discussed this bug a while ago, and the consensus was that this was cumbersome to solve within the driver: - we wouldn't want running *any* user space driver component to try to unload the kernel module, so probably limit this approach to just the X driver, but what about non-X components? libnvidia-cfg.so (used by `nvidia-xconfig --query-gpu-info`)? what about the upcoming CUDA compute driver? - unloading would need to be done in userspace rather than in the kernel, but the user space portion doesn't have easy access to the module usage count, so it would require some more complicated handshaking to negotiate when it was safe to unload (or atleast when an unload is not expected to succeed) - if we wanted to backport this to the 71xx legacy drivers, we'd have problems solving this in nvidia_drv.o because the driver is inside the XF86 libc wrapper; that's solvable, but cumbersome. It feels to me like the problem you encountered here would be better solved through package management. I remember when we first developed nvidia-installer, you suggested having nvidia-installer not let you install while the X server was running (I think you found problems with the nv driver running while the NVIDIA kernel module was loaded). In general, it seems cleaner to need to first uninstall the current NVIDIA driver before installing the new driver. And I think that's our recommendation. Of course NVIDIA's willing to work with you on this, but it doesn't seem like having the X driver unload the kernel module is the right solution. FWIW, NVIDIA does still need to solve the problem of allowing multiple driver versions to coexist on the file system at once, even if only one is allowed to be used at a time (we receive this request from various distros building LiveCDs), so it may be that as we work through the issues for that, some better solutions to this current problem may arise. But I think the best course of action is for your rpm packaging to more strictly enforce when the driver can be installed, similar to what nvidia-installer does. Let me know what I can do to help. Thanks, - Andy -- Configure bugmail: https://bugzilla.novell.com/userprefs.cgi?tab=email ------- You are receiving this mail because: ------- You are on the CC list for the bug, or are watching someone who is.