[pkg-nvidia-devel] Bug#586502: nvidia-glx: Xorg doesn't try to load nvidia driver even though all other drivers have been removed

[Andreas Beckmann]

Olivier Mehani wrote:
> When using the nvidia-glx driver on a machine which xserver-xorg supports
> nouveau, Xorg tries to probe all the non-proprietary drivers that have been
> built-in (and provided by xserver-xorg-video-all). This includes, in this
> order, nouveau, nv, vesa and fbdev for my video card.

Xorg is not aware of the proprietary drivers, so autoconfiguration does
not add them to this list.

> Despite the blacklist added by nvidia-kernel-common to fix bug #580894, Xorg's
> probing nouveau does load the kernel module, along with the already loaded
> proprietary nvidia module.

This should probably go into a separate bug report, and I don't think
it's nvidia-glx fault if something does not honour the blacklists.

> The solution I found to that was to uninstall all non-proprietary Xorg video
> drivers mentionned earlier, to leave a clear spot for the proprietary one.
> 
> However, X still didn't load as it was sequentially trying to load these
> drivers (and fail as the files weren't there anymore). X eventually exits
> without trying to load the nvidia driver.

Unfortunately Xorg has no way to easily make it aware of additional
drivers (there was a possibility once to drop a list of pci ids, but
this is no longer enabled in the debian xorg build), so
autoconfiguration does not work and you'll have to create a small xorg.conf.

> It appears that adding a snippet of Xorg.conf in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/
> (e.g. 99-nvidia-glx.conf) makes X aware of this other driver.

Unfortunately this breaks the X configuration if nvidia-glx is installed
but no hardware/kernel module is available. I also couldn't find a
solution to override this file with an /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So adding
this snippet causes more trouble than it solves.

> The attached 99-nvidia-glx.conf is not really a patch, but I suspect that if
> the nvidia-glx package
> provided such a file (maybe with a simple debconf script to enable/disable it),
> it would solve a lot of troubles trying to install this driver.

Please read the README file, it instructs you how to setup your
xorg.conf to use the nvidia driver. This is nothing that can be
automated that easily, especially if you want to use TwinView or other
features.


Andreas