When using the nvidia-glx driver on a machine which xserver-xorg supports
nouveau, Xorg tries to probe all the non-proprietary drivers that have been
built-in (and provided by xserver-xorg-video-all). This includes, in this
order, nouveau, nv, vesa and fbdev for my video card.

Despite the blacklist added by nvidia-kernel-common to fix bug #580894, Xorg's
probing nouveau does load the kernel module, along with the already loaded
proprietary nvidia module.

The solution I found to that was to uninstall all non-proprietary Xorg video
drivers mentionned earlier, to leave a clear spot for the proprietary one.

However, X still didn't load as it was sequentially trying to load these
drivers (and fail as the files weren't there anymore). X eventually exits
without trying to load the nvidia driver.

It appears that adding a snippet of Xorg.conf in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/
(e.g. 99-nvidia-glx.conf) makes X aware of this other driver.

The attached 99-nvidia-glx.conf is not really a patch, but I suspect that if
the nvidia-glx package
provided such a file (maybe with a simple debconf script to enable/disable it),
it would solve a lot of troubles trying to install this driver.

<cranky except-for="Nouveau">This is also the last time I'm buying an NVidia
card... I'm not even sure we should bother, considering they don't...</cranky>

Olivier Mehani wrote:

Xorg is not aware of the proprietary drivers, so autoconfiguration does
not add them to this list.

This should probably go into a separate bug report, and I don't think
it's nvidia-glx fault if something does not honour the blacklists.

Unfortunately Xorg has no way to easily make it aware of additional
drivers (there was a possibility once to drop a list of pci ids, but
this is no longer enabled in the debian xorg build), so
autoconfiguration does not work and you'll have to create a small xorg.conf.

Unfortunately this breaks the X configuration if nvidia-glx is installed
but no hardware/kernel module is available. I also couldn't find a
solution to override this file with an /etc/X11/xorg.conf. So adding
this snippet causes more trouble than it solves.

Please read the README file, it instructs you how to setup your
xorg.conf to use the nvidia driver. This is nothing that can be
automated that easily, especially if you want to use TwinView or other
features.


Andreas

Andreas Beckmann <debian@abeckmann.de> writes:

Well, sadly, the blacklist doesn't say to never load the module at all,
even if explicitly requested, just not to automatically load it based on
detection of particular PCI IDs.  I'm not sure there's any way to say not
to load it at all.

I still agree with Andreas's conclusion here.  I'm just not sure there's
any reportable bug here at all.  X.org (somewhat rightfully) favors the
non-proprietary drivers.  I think at the end of the day we're stuck with
documenting required manual configuration to use the NVIDIA drivers.

It would be nice if this were restored, since this is the cleanest way.  I
wonder if Ubuntu is doing something different there.  I see that they have
a completely different way of packaging the NVIDIA drivers.  (They also
seem to include all the variants in a single package.)

tags 586502 - patch
clone 586502 -1
retitle -1 Please reenable PCI_TXT_IDS_DIR for third-party drivers
submitter -1 !
severity -1 wishlist
reassign -1 xserver-xorg-core 2:1.7.7-4
thanks

Dear Debian X Strike Force,

please reenable the PCI_TXT_IDS_DIR feature of Xorg. Even if it is not
used by Xorg itself, it would simplify automatic configuration of third
party drivers (the non-free nvidia driver in this case). Xorg does not
(and needs not to) know details about the existence of these drivers as
long as finding a matching PCI ID redirects it to the correct driver,
Currently an xorg.conf has to be created by the user because
autoconfiguration does not use the proprietary driver.

Or is there another solution to plug some driver into Xorg without
creating an xorg.conf?


Thanks.


Andreas

nvidia now implemented a different way to automatically integrate with
Xorg via DRM (without needing an xorg.conf specifying a specific Driver),
so this feature request is no longer relevant from my side.


Andreas