Ralph's comments: > I am not talking about flakey hardware, I am talking about the first > solutions for running the nividia kernel in a dom0. Those lead to > spontaneous reboots at least twice a day ... > So if you say that it now is working and is stable - I have nothing > against that article on the wiki. If we have to slap a warning sign on > the article "This can crash your machine", I'd rather not :) Perhaps some background is in order... I'm a Unix/Linux system administrator and my desktop system runs Linux (CentOS). My motivation for this topic was twofold: 1. I wanted the ability to prototype systems and test software via Xen-based VMs on my desktop system. 2. I also wanted reasonable graphics performance on dual, high-res flat panels (single desktop across two 1600x1200 screens). Obviously, if one downloads the NVIDIA driver package and attempts to install on a Xen-enabled kernel, it says Xen is not supported and the installer exits. When I googled the topic, I found several articles that were either: -- Very out of date (years) -- Had an incomplete set of instructions that an "average user" would not be able to follow. -- Had a very complex/convoluted set of instructions (building entire custom kernels, etc.) -- Solved different problems (e.g., the one set of RPMs rebuilding/repackaging the NVIDIA module so it would not be kernel dot-release sensitive). I spent a couple week weeding through all this info and came up with a solution where I had a concrete set of (reasonable) steps and it works. While I can't promise that it will work for everyone and every combination of hardware, it has worked well for me. There is no voo-doo in the mix that is tied to my specific set-up, so I would expect it to work for others too. [crhea at kaizen ~]$ uname -a Linux kaizen.mayo.edu 2.6.18-164.10.1.el5xen #1 SMP Thu Jan 7 20:28:30 EST 2010 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux [crhea at kaizen ~]$ cat /etc/redhat-release CentOS release 5.4 (Final) [crhea at kaizen ~]$ uptime 10:47:40 up 35 days, 19:56, 9 users, load average: 0.12, 0.03, 0.01 [crhea at kaizen ~]$ glxgears 70539 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14107.752 FPS 70601 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14120.141 FPS 70586 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14117.038 FPS 70616 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14123.051 FPS 70577 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14115.374 FPS 70619 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14123.761 FPS 70592 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14118.317 FPS 70752 frames in 5.0 seconds = 14150.232 FPS What I have written so far is about 150 lines of text. --- Cris -- Cris Rhea
