NVidia driver installation on PCBSD 9 rc 3 beta - PC-BSD Forums

Carr · #1 10-19-2011, 07:14 PM

Please note that before posting this I did a fairly extensive search on the forum and also web wide and did not find what I was looking for. I have just installed 9 beta rc 3 on a rather old P4 platform. I ran 8.2 before this and was extremely pleased with machine performance. 9 seems to be a resource hog though looking at CPU usage. During the installation 9rc3 found the NVidia graphics card and installed the driver. It is apparently not used because when trying to run the NVidia GUI control widget I get "not using the NVidia driver. Please run nvidia-xconfigure as root. Fine. The Nvidia command does not work...i.e command not found. I am a crossover from Linux so learned that modprobe doesnt seem to work on BSD either. I ran UNIX many many years ago on PDP 11's and an AT&T desktop running one of the Berkley forks. So I have a lot to learn. From using the system I believe what I consider excess CPU usage comes from the graphics card not using the NVidia driver. Moreover I am at somewhat of a loss to try to force the issue vi'ing the Xorg.conf file. If anyone can make a suggestion or two it would be appreciated. While I am here I notice a message as the machine is booting up something to the effect of "Warning:Witness option is enabled. Expect reduced performance. What is this? How to disable it?

Regards and many thanks to all of you smart people here.
Carr

Rakor · #2 10-19-2011, 07:44 PM

Using the command 'kldstat' you can see what modules are loaded. So there should be a nvidia.ko somewhere. If not you can load it using 'kldload nvidia'. If it does not work you should have a look if the module is really installed on your harddrive.

The command you should use is 'nvidia-xconfig' (not 'nvidia-xconfigure').

The /etc/X11/xorg.conf should then have 'nvidia' as videodriver in it.

Is all this done on your system?

kmoore134 · #3 10-19-2011, 07:45 PM

You may have installed the nvidia driver, but did you select it on the
display wizard screen? I.E. if you reboot and hit any key at the
text-splash screen, select option 6 "Run display wizard" to be brought
back to it. Make sure that the driver selected is "nvidia".

Carr · #4 10-19-2011, 07:46 PM

Raktor

Many thanks for the kind suggestions. Will check these and post results.

Again many many thanks for the info.

Carr

Rakor · #5 10-19-2011, 07:48 PM

But the Name is 'Rakor' ;-) No 't' in there :-D

Carr · #6 10-19-2011, 08:12 PM

Rakor and Kmoore134--

Rakor-- sorry about the typo

When first running the display wizard, NVidia was already selected. Changed the resolution from 1024x768-- what system installation had defaulted to-- to 1280x1024 (the native resolution of the monitor). X would not restart and brought back the original screen. Fiddling with the settings I was finally able to get the desired resolution to work with the nv driver rather than the NVidia one. Additionally watching system monitor CPU usage is down from around 30% at idle to under 20%. Memory usage seems better as well. FYI the platform is a Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard with 2 GB of ram and an NVidia FX5500 memory card with 256 MB of ram-- so it doesnt take much for the video to start demanding a lot more CPU time to get taken care of. One thought that occurs is that the NVidia driver may be intended for newer cards......One thing I have not done is check the HCL to see if this old a card is supported.

Thanks to all of you for the kind help and a great forum.

Rakor · #7 10-19-2011, 08:26 PM

Hi there,

You know the nv is the wrong driver. I would try getting it ruh with the lower resolution. After that you could try setting the res with the nvidia-tool 'nvidia-settings'.

Maybe that's working for you.

The card should really be sdupported by the driver.

Carr · #8 10-19-2011, 09:52 PM

Rakor

The video works fine with the lower resolution-1024x768- and Nvidia selected but for some reason it wont accept the 1280x1024. Using the wizard its possible to select 1280x1024 and nv and the wizard successfully completes and starts the desktop. Additionally even with the NVidia driver selected on monitor wizard, the NVidia tool will not work.Furthermore kldstat (even with the NVidia driver selected on the Wizard) shows no Nvidia driver loaded. Running kldload nvidia loads the driver. However even with the driver loaded, an attempt to use the NVidia graphics widget yields the "You are not using the Nvidia driver--run nvidia-xconfig as root" message. SU'ing the nvidia-xconfig command from a terminal window yields again, command not found. So thats where I am. The wizard seems to not know which driver is loaded because it claims NVidia but there is no Nvidia module visible in kldstat. I am assuming that kldstat and kldload are similar to the modprobe series of commands in Linux? Anyway I did a kldload nvidia then kldstat and it appeared in the list. I rebooted and ran from boot the wizard. Same results, wizard says that we are using the nvidia driver as it did before , and it still wont accept the higher resolution. So back to the desktop, kldstat and no nvidia module loaded. So apparently when you use kldload to load the module, its only there until the next boot.

Couple of comments here from someone who has run Linux for years -- I currently have 2 multi monitor systems running linux, one with 4 monitors and 2 PCIE cards on an I7 platform, the other is a Core quad with 2 cards and 2 monitors. All of the graphics cards are NVidia. One extremely frustrating problem (and I do not know a way around this) is that whatever configuration tool that is used from the GUI in Linux is apparently NOT aware of what exactly exists in the xorg.conf file in /etc (in Linux). What you end up with as exampled here is the GUI tool in this case, the monitor wizard, reporting wrong information i.e. that you are using the NVidia driver when something else entirely may exist. Additionally in running the monitor wizard as many times as I have and watching the text on the screen as part of this process when X is not running, it seems that X is falling back on a basic X configuration created at install. There is no indication of that on the GUI tool. So what can happen is that you can play with the monitor wizard all day and you dont end up creating a usable Xconf file...or if you do it does not get used and the reason is not readily apparent. I understand the reasons for doing this i.e. someone who cant vi the xconf file, and make good entries by hand and only uses wizards can mess up X where it has no hope of starting. ....but it seems to me from years of messing with linux, that there needs to be , particularly since we seem to be moving more and more into a GUI environment, a way of creating a better graphic interface that actually can "read" what exists in xconf and report it accurately in the GUI rather than simply a widget that can only write to the file. Unfortunately I dont know how to accomplish this.

Enough of my opinions. What has to be done to force the kernel to load the NVidia driver on boot?

Well I ve rattled on quite a bit here LOL thanks again to all of you

Carr

Carr · #9 10-20-2011, 01:51 AM

As a brief update--nvidia-xconfig did not get installed for some reason. Went to Freshports.org, found a copy and installed it. Ran it and following that X would not run. Ran the monitor wizard from boot and put everything back using the nv driver and 1280x1024. X runs fine now. I dont think for some reason the NVidia driver wants to play well with my system.

Carr

Rakor · #10 10-20-2011, 07:16 AM

Sooo..... Let's have a look.

To have the kernelmodule loaded on systemboot you have to put the following line in the file '/boot/loader.conf'

Code:

nvidia_load="YES"

But this line should be automatically added by nvidia. Also you need to have linux-emulation-support added in the '/etc/rc.conf'. This should also be done by nvidia.

kldstat and kldload (there is also an kldunload - but better don't use it!) are similar to the antecessors of modprobe 'insmod' and how they were called.

I think you haved restartet the Xorg between the changes, right? (Not a whole reboot because you loose the kernelmodule then as you said).

I think the wizard does not show you what you are using, but guesses what hardware is there and therefor guesses what driver you should use. The interpretation of the xorg.conf is never easy... Not even for some humans

I have a very basic xorg.conf, but if you like you can have a look at it: http://www.denkrobat.de/wiki/index.php/Xorg.conf (but the file is old now... This evening I'll have a look if it was changes since then).

After all you could say: All this stuff should have been done by the PC-BSD-Tools you used to install the driver. Have you tried removing it (unsing the PC-BSD-Tools) and adding it again?

Cu