[elrepo-devel] nvidia-detect users

[Phil Perry]

Hi all,

I have a question about how folks are using nvidia-detect, and wondered 
if anyone is using it from within a script or at install time before X 
is installed?

One of the things nvidia-detect does is to check Xorg ABI comatibility 
with the nvidia driver. At present we do this by checking the Xorg log 
file (if it exists) for various strings to see if it has been logged. If 
the log file doesn't exist, or we can't match the search term, we can 
just return a soft error or unknown value. This allows nvidia-detect to 
work even if Xorg is not installed or has never been started.

I have always felt this to be a rather crude way of returning the value 
for the Xorg ABI, and would rather call the inbuilt Xorg function that 
directly queries VendorRelease() directly and determine the ABI version 
from that. However, that is going to add some X11 dependencies to our 
package that would require certain X11 packages to be installed before 
nvidia-detect can be used.

Would this affect the way you use nvidia-detect?

I'm guessing if you are using nvidia-detect, you either already have 
Xorg installed, or are intending to install it, so this shouldn't cause 
an issue, but I want to check before making changes that could affect 
the way people are using the program.

Phil