Bug 1079

Summary: RFE: nvidia driver should disable itself if no nvidia card present
Product: Fedora Reporter: James Heather <drfudgeboy>
Component: xorg-x11-drv-nvidiaAssignee: Nicolas Chauvet <kwizart>
Status: RESOLVED EXPIRED    
Severity: normal CC: leigh123linux, s.adam
Priority: P5    
Version: unspecified   
Hardware: All   
OS: GNU/Linux   
namespace:

Description James Heather 2010-02-12 10:04:41 CET 
I'm a big fan of the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia stuff and I use it on several machines. It works really well.

The one big pain is that it can't be sensibly used on a bootable USB stick. This is because X fails to start if the nvidia driver is enabled and there's no nvidia card in the machine. Obviously on a fixed machine that's not an issue--don't install nvidia if there's no suitable card. But a bootable USB stick needs to work on whatever hardware it finds.

So I'm left with two options: either a USB stick that works only on nvidia machines, or one that's stuck with nouveau even when I could be using nvidia. This is a real shame.

Three suggestions:

(1) X is supposed to auto-detect the driver to use if there's no Xorg.conf. Couldn't the nvidia driver hook into this somehow?

(2) When the nvidia driver tries to start and fails, could this be detected, and could it then be disabled and X started again? (Maybe this is essentially the same as (1), I'm not sure.)

(3) Some logic in /etc/init.d/nvidia to enable it only if there's suitable hardware. Currently it checks whether the module is installed, but it could also

  lspci | grep -i vga | grep -i nvidia

or similar, and disable if nothing is found. Disabling presumably also means deleting Xorg.conf so that the system can boot up with the auto-detection.

What do you think? I think it could be made robust, but if it's a bit fragile it could at least be optional so that it can be used on USB sticks, which currently have no sensible way of using nvidia.

James
Comment 1 Nicolas Chauvet 2010-09-27 11:48:38 CEST 
We cannot implement this the way it was worded.
Currently if you install the nvidia driver, it means that you have the hardware and plan to run the binary driver as the primary adapter.

Now we could try the other way in the corner case of a livecd for example.
By default, such binary driver won't be used, and Xorg that will not have an xorg.conf will correctly guess the open-source driver.
Now if one want to enable a binary driver, it will be possible with a grub option (similar to what we have tweaked in the current grub.conf).

So the idea is to have an initscript that will tweak a correct xorg.conf according to the grub boot option and before Xorg is launched...
Comment 2 Emmanuel Seyman 2013-02-12 01:42:23 CET 
This version of Fedora will reach end of life today (2013-02-12) and RPMFusion will no longer be releasing updates for it. This bug will be set to RESOLVED:EXPIRED next week to reflect this.

If the problem persists after upgrading to the latest version of Fedora, please
update the version field of this bug (and re-open it if it has been closed).