Hello,
I would like to step up into mantaining the Nvidia driver for Fedora and introducing it to RHEL/CentOS as well.
I have quite some experience with them and have all sort of hardware (Optimus laptops, SLI systems, etc.) and operating systems to test on.
Some are not relevant (like dkms modules, the package rename, etc.) and maybe we could create a list of points for merging.
The RHEL effort actually is very limited [2] compared to Fedora and I have quite an experience in that as well; so this would be an easy win.
I've also prepared new 331.17 packages that build also the "multiple" kernel module variant [3] for systems with multiple video cards for CUDA setups. The "basic nvidia driver" package for the casual user/gamer requires the smaller and basic driver package; while the "cuda enabled driver" pulls in the additional modules required for particular setups. All of this is also for RHEL, of course.
14684264 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia.ko
10576 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia-frontend.ko
46608 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia-uvm.ko
14647616 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia0.ko
14650456 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia1.ko
14649144 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia2.ko
14649680 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia3.ko
14649144 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia4.ko
14649144 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia5.ko
14648520 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia6.ko
14648968 Oct 23 12:58 /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia7.ko
This because most of the nvidia driver bundle (like 70% of it) is not required for normal use and the whole suit of kernel modules, if built on a normal system through akmod can take 5/10 minutes to rebuild on a normal system; and frankly, no user should have such a waste of space:
$ du -hs /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia
126M /usr/lib/modules/3.11.6-200.fc19.x86_64/extra/nvidia
I discussed a bit about it with Nicholas Chauvet a few months ago and he expressed interest into it.
Are the current Nvidia driver mantainer interested about this?
Any chance for me to contribute to both RHEL and Fedora?
Regards,
--Simone