Test needed - Was : NVIDIA driver and graphical grub2?

[Nicolas Chauvet]

Hello,

I need testers, specially to test this unreported issue to our bugzilla.

With a fresh fedora 17 installation (RC1 and beyond) the grub2
graphical behaviour is enabled. leading the use of the vesafb in
higher resolution than usual. Using vesafb is explicitely unsupported
by nvidia (such as using vga= parameter on the kernel line).

Please check either the nvidia driver works in this setup for your case.
(and It may work for one card and break on another).

The xorg-x11-drv-nvidia package to test is available from
rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing. It should be a new installation.
(so please remove the driver, reboot and reinstall the driver and
reboot).


Feedbacks trully awaited.

Thx

Nicolas (kwizart)

2012/5/18 Nicolas Chauvet <kwizart at gmail.com>:
> 2012/5/17 Nicolas Chauvet <kwizart at gmail.com>:
>> Hi Adam,
>>
>> 2012/5/17 Adam Williamson <adamwill at shaw.ca>:
>>> So I'm talking to a guy on IRC (freegz), who uses the NVIDIA driver. It
>>> seems that when he converted from non-graphical grub2 to graphical grub2
>>> (which we've changed relatively recently in F17), the NVIDIA driver
>>> stopped working. It sounds rather like the issue with nomodeset and
>>> graphical grub2 raised in this thread on test:
>>
>> I don't understand why the nvidia driver would have any impact on the
>> grub2 level.
>> The only option used by the driver is not nomodeset but
>> nouveau.nomodeset=0 and rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau which doesn't
>> involve the nvidia driver at this time.
>>
>>> https://lists.fedoraproject.org/pipermail/test/2012-May/108022.html
>> I saw that message - unfortunately no usefull information on this thread.
>>
>>> so, it sounds like someone might need to check into how to make nvidia
>>> play nice with graphical grub2. I'm guessing it's possible as ubuntu
>>> seems to default to graphical grub2, but I thought it'd be worth a
>>> heads-up.
>>
>> I will try to see if that can be improved with an options. But again,
>> we don't load anything from nvidia at the grub2 level. So I'm not sure
>> to understand.
>>
>> That been said, nvidia used to unsupport any vga= like boot option
>> that will allow graphical boot (plymouth level, this time) with nvidia
>> driver using vesafb.
>> As a consequence, I  don't think to enable this by default.
>>
>>
>> FYI, I plan an enhancement to support a second grub menu for allowing
>> a switch with opensource drivers from grub2.
>> https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2317
>
>
> OK , so I've reproduced the problem with a fresh install.
> - First, "grubby --default-kernel" seems to be broken again. (I will
> workaround it from the package).
> - Second, graphical boot activation seems to trigger vesafb as a
> failback from none KMS driver.
> This is known incompatible with the nvidia binary, and I expect that's
> the reason why Xorg cannot load.
> Help welcomed in this area.
>
> Nicolas (kwizart)