[elrepo-devel] nvidia-detect users

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 3/3/19 4:11 PM, Phil Perry wrote:
> 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?

I do not. Where I work, I am almost always doing yum install 
nvidia-detect && yum install $(nvidia-detect) , always on already 
installed systems running in runlevel 5.


>
> 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?

probably not, since, as I mentioned earlier, I always install the nvidia 
drivers after the system is already using the distro drivers ( and for a 
reason or another, that driver is not satisfactory )


>
> 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,

you are 100% right here. after all one uses nvidia-detect to find out 
which drivers to install _for_X_


> but I want to check before making changes that could affect the way 
> people are using the program.

just a random thought: would an approach similar to emacs/emacs-nox be 
too much of a burden, if you find out that the dependencies on Xorg 
might be (at least sometime ) unwanted ?



wolfy ( who uses mostly AMD processors with built-in graphics )