[elrepo] nvidia-detect users

[kht-lists]

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
On Sunday, March 3, 2019 9:11 AM, Phil Perry <phil at elrepo.org> 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?
>
> 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
>
> elrepo mailing list
> elrepo at lists.elrepo.org
> http://lists.elrepo.org/mailman/listinfo/elrepo

I have only used nvidia-detect a few times. In the case of CentOS 6 on my Dell StudioXPS machine some years ago I first used it when the ATI card I had in the PC was no longer supported by CentOS.  I reinstalled the nVidia card which came with the PC and used nvidia-detect to determine the correct driver. When that card became obsolete I installed a Quadro K420 and again used nvidia-detect to determine the correct driver. In both cases X was already installed.

When I purchased a Dell Precision 3620 with a Quadro K620 card I installed CentOS 7 minimal (no gui) then "X Window system" and mate-desktop-environment from epel. Once this was running I again used nvidia-detect to determine the correct driver for the video card. I had X up and working before running nvidia-detect.

That is about all I can offer. Thank you for all the hard work you do to support CentOS uses.

Ken