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

[Russ Allbery]

Andreas Beckmann <debian at abeckmann.de> writes:
> Olivier Mehani wrote:

>> 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.

Well, sadly, the blacklist doesn't say to never load the module at all,
even if explicitly requested, just not to automatically load it based on
detection of particular PCI IDs.  I'm not sure there's any way to say not
to load it at all.

I still agree with Andreas's conclusion here.  I'm just not sure there's
any reportable bug here at all.  X.org (somewhat rightfully) favors the
non-proprietary drivers.  I think at the end of the day we're stuck with
documenting required manual configuration to use the NVIDIA drivers.

> 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 would be nice if this were restored, since this is the cleanest way.  I
wonder if Ubuntu is doing something different there.  I see that they have
a completely different way of packaging the NVIDIA drivers.  (They also
seem to include all the variants in a single package.)

-- 
Russ Allbery (rra at debian.org)               <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>