[elrepo] Nvidia Driver Performance: El Repo vs. NVidia's .run file

[EBradley at williams-int.com]

Hello Manuel and Phil,

Thank you both for the prompt replies! Before I provide the info requested by Manuel I wanted to share something I discovered in the interim. On my test machine (still using the el repo drivers) I realized that the terminal window from which Ansys Mechanical was launched contained an error message I hadn't seen earlier:

libGl error: failed to load driver: swrast

This error message is not present when launching the program from the user's machine mentioned earlier, as it is now using the .run driver from Nvidia.com. Googling led me to a few different sites, one of which recommended checking out the symbolic links in /usr/lib64; specifically those regarding libGL.so.1. Upon doing so, and in comparing my machine to the user's machine, I realized there were some pretty obvious differences between the two. To start, /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1 on the user's machine is a symbolic link to libGL.so.361.42 whereas on my machine it links to libGL.so.1.2.0. The libGL.so.361.42 file on my machine is contained in /usr/lib64/nvidia, a folder which is not present on the user's machine. This folder contains, as one would expect, many Nvidia-specific library files and symbolic links that appear to be contained directly in /usr/lib64 on the user's machine. When I modified my /usr/lib64/libGL.so.1 symbolic link to point to /usr/lib64/nvidia/libGl.so.361.42 the part was displayed as expected in Ansys Mechanical and the error message re: swrast was also absent from the terminal window.

While this is good, I have to assume that my fix of reconfiguring the symbolic link for libGl.so.1 isn't suitable for long-term production use as the next update to the el repo driver or kernel will most likely overwrite my changes. I am also a bit concerned that there are other applications waiting to call upon some other library or symbolic link that is missing/misconfigured. The differences between /usr/lib64 on my machine and the user's seems too great to be ignored. I'm not sure if this gives you enough to go on in identifying a bug so please let me know if there's anything else I can provide, or if you'd still like to see the info originally requested by Manuel.

Thanks,


Evan 
WILLIAMS INTERNATIONAL                                  THE POWER OF VISION     

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