[SOLVED] nVidia kernel/drivers

[aguador]

I have been running Mga6-sta-1 with E20 for about a month on an Asus laptop with a second gen Core i5 and an nVidia GeForce 601M video card. It seems the card was not detected during installation (minimal/net), so there is neither bumblebee nor an nVidia-specific kernel. (In fact "radeon-firmware" was installed instead.) The bottomline is that the laptop runs hot and left edge bindings do not work. (I assume the binding problem is related as I experienced it with prior versions of Mageia KDE running without nVidia kernels/drivers.)

Three questions:

First, will the proper drivers and kernel be installed by simply by installing bumblebee? Drakrpm indicates a significant number of dependencies that will be brought in including devel kernels and dkms.

Second, can I safely remove "radeon-firmware"? (I assume so, but I hate those blank screens when the proper driver is not present!)

Third, should I do a bug report on hardware detection? I have been hesitant to do so as this may now have been corrected -- and there are already a number of nVidia/optimus-related bugs.

[doktor5000]

First, will the proper drivers and kernel be installed by simply by installing bumblebee? Drakrpm indicates a significant number of dependencies that will be brought in including devel kernels and dkms.

No, bumblebee is only for switching between nvidia and intel graphics during runtime, but if you run drakx11 or harddrake then bumblebee plus the nvidia drivers should be installed, including their dependencies.

Second, can I safely remove "radeon-firmware"? (I assume so, but I hate those blank screens when the proper driver is not present!)

Why do you want to remove it, it does not hurt.

Third, should I do a bug report on hardware detection? I have been hesitant to do so as this may now have been corrected -- and there are already a number of nVidia/optimus-related bugs.

If you did not choose to install/use the proprietary driver during install or later on, there's no bug.

[aguador]

Thanks for the quick reply. My bad on the driver. I keep forgetting that the nVidia driver is not free. Should the installer provide a warning the way harddrake2 does (i.e., there's a proprietary driver for your card that has extra features, etc.)?

I have both the nVidia driver and bumblebee installed now (forgot to confirm if the latter would have brought in the driver automatically).

Unfortunately the splash screen does not display properly now (pushed off to the right) -- and the right edge binding is still not working. Nonetheless, the driver issue is solved, so will mark the thread solved.

EDIT1: In experimenting more I discovered that choosing to install bumblebee will bring in the non-free driver, at least if the repository has been activated in the media list.

EDIT2: OK, I just "unsolved" this issue in light of an additional consideration:

I understand that Optimus is not well-supported in Mageia, but as I have found for a second time (the prior time in Mageia 3 or 4) it is easy to hang the system when configuring the two cards. As far as I can see, the server configuration tool easily allows the misconfiguration of xorg.conf.

As is documented, Mageia detects the two cards as a multi-monitor setup. If you choose "Configure the monitors independently", you need to go through the configuration twice, the first time choosing the Intel integrated graphics, and the second time nVidia. If you just go through only once to configure the nVidia card, Device 1 in xorg.conf is changed to nVidia. However, on boot the system attempts to use Intel, so hangs.

What is not clear to me is what happens if you choose the option to configure only one or the other. (I now have a clean xorg.conf file and am not prepared to play more today!) From other documentation, choosing only Intel needs to be path -- leaving nVidia unconfigured.

This seems to be less a "bug" than a documentation issue. "Help," in the configuration tool, brings up the installation documentation which does not deal with the problem. The best information I found was in the errata for Mageia 5: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Errata#NVIDIA_Optimus_support_and_known_limitations (and later came across this comment in a bug report https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=13986#c9). My suggestion would be a) to incorporate the information in the installation documentation and b) add a warning on the screen of the configuration tool.

If I am off-base here, I would appreciate being set straight. If I am correct, is a new bug reportin order?

[doktor5000]

Should the installer provide a warning the way harddrake2 does?

I don't know what warning you're referring to, warning about what? FWIW, you can also choose the proprietary driver during installation if you have online repos configured or if you're installing from an installation media that contains the nonfree packages for the driver.

Unfortunately the splash screen does not display properly now (pushed off to the right) -- and the right edge binding is still not working.

I have no clue what splashscreen you are referring to, nor what "right edge bindings" you mean, you should provide some more details on that and maybe a screenshot so others better understand what you describe.

[aguador]

Sorry, I just did an extensive edit on other issues.

The config tool for nVidia offers the option of the proprietary driver noting that it may have additional features. It might be nice if that popped up during installation (although now that I think of it the install only asked me about the integrated Intel chips).

As far as the splash screen is concerned, there is now wide blue band on the left side that displaces the wallpaper.

Regarding the edge bindings, E20 allows one to flip virtual desktops when reaching an edge (with or without clicking on the edge depending on configuration). However, I am not able to flip to the desktops to the right of the one I am on at the current time. The cursor just disappears without displaying the new desktop. I had a similar issue in earlier versions running KDE where I could not define edge bindings (e.g., display all virtual desktops, display the cube with desktops, etc.) without the nVidia driver installed.

Please see my prior edit for details of the xorg.conf problem.

[aguador]

OK, I now have the proprietary driver and bumblebee installed properly and the right edge binding now works as it should.

After further testing here is what I have found:

Installing bumblebee does indeed bring in the nVidia driver, presumably because bumblee no longer works with nouveau as noted here https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bumblebee#Installing_Bumblebee_with_Intel.2FNouveau

Drakx11 does not specifically say that the on-board Intel graphics need to be configured first, then nVidia. However, if only nVidia is configured or perhaps if it is configured first, it will hang the system.

Drakx11 will ask if you want to use the proprietary driver. However, the resulting xorg.conf file will specify the nouveau driver (at least if present on the system), not the nVidia driver

Drakx11 will install the nouveau driver if NOT present even after asking if you want to use the proprietary driver!

The only way to get the Optimus technology working properly is to eliminate the xorg.conf file as noted in the links in my second post above

The implications of the last point are serious because, using drakx11 apparently always produces an xorg.conf file despite the fact that it should not be present on systems with Optimus technology.

[doktor5000]

Well, given that you're doing this on a development version, and that we still don't have full support for hybrid graphics, that's not a bad result IMHO.

And thanks for sharing your feedback, it might help if you could add some notes what you needed to do, starting with a fresh sta1 installation to get nvidia and bumblebee working.
Because we have a wiki page for bumblebee itself: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Bumblebee
Although some more complete documentation regarding hybrid graphics is still missing apart from the few pieces we carry along in errata: https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Mageia_5_Err ... d_graphics
and our MAQeia is mostly pieced together and many things may be irrelevant nowadays: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1755

[aguador]

Thanks for your kind words, doktor5000. However, I had my doubts that I could contribute reliably on this issue, and indeed, it seems that I now have things working better WITH an xorg.conf file -- even though that file indicates a driver I do not have installed! See https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19572.

[doktor5000]

Glancing over the bugreport, your issue seems to resolve around how the opengl libraries are setup by default. You may need to look some more into the libGL alternatives setup, I believe this should show the most part of it:

Code: Select all

/sbin/alternatives --display gl_conf

and then check to where the default symlinks resolve. This is to ensure that mesa libgl (software accelerated opengl) can coexist with hardware accelerated opengl from the proprietary drivers.

To see which libraries are used due to ldconfig cache see

Code: Select all

ldconfig -p | grep -iE "nvidia|libGL"

Some links with some related information on the matter:
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi ... -libraries
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5137
https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=16691#c13