[pkg-nvidia-devel] Bug#583312: Bug#583312: possible fix

[Russ Allbery]

Petter Reinholdtsen <pere at hungry.com> writes:
> [Russ Allbery]

>> If you're experiencing a variant of #521699, then the problem is
>> that the timeout in KDM is too fast.  You need to tell KDM to wait
>> longer; it takes the NVIDIA driver longer to initialize the card
>> than it's willing to wait for.  I suspect that the only thing that
>> parallel booting is doing is starting kdm sooner and hence giving
>> the NVIDIA module even less time to initialize the hardware.

> What is loading the nvidia driver?  When is it done?

It's loaded dynamically by the X server when it starts.  These days, I
believe that's done via the device mappings provided in the
nvidia-kernel-common package, which alias char-major-195* to the nvidia
kernel module, although I'm not deeply familiar with the details of how
dynamic hardware initialization is handled.  But the kernel module is not
loaded until the X server is started, and it's loaded automatically at
that point.

> If it is done by some init.d script,

It's not, unless the mknod commands in the nvidia-kernel init script are
doing some sort of deep magic that I'm fairly sure they're not.  There's
definitely no explicit call to modprobe anywhere in an init script
provided by NVIDIA packages.

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