nvidia-config-display misbehavior

[Stewart Adam]

On 2009/11/18 1:27 PM, Neal Becker wrote:
> Since nvidia driver is currently not working well with my system, I wanted to
> give nouveau another try.  I edited xorg.conf, changing from nvidia to
> nouveau, then did nvidia-config-display disable.  Then telinit 3, telinit 5.
> Surprise!  No X.
>
> After investigating, I found that every time I run telinit, nvidia script will
> _rewrite xorg.conf_!
>
> Imagine my surprise. nvidia-config-display disable doesn't actually disable
> nvidia.  The only reliable way to disable (temporarily) is rename the kernel
> module.  (I don't want to yum remove nvidia stuff, last thing I need to is have
> to have a working network connection to restore it)
>
> Why would anyone want to type 'nvidia-config-display disable', only to have it
> magically re-enable itself?
>
This is the expected (and documented) behavior:
http://rpmfusion.org/Package/xorg-x11-drv-nvidia#head-ba705670506fd0e4b957d0609fb0c2839dbf2563

nvidia-config-display will only temporarily disable the driver, to 
permanently disable you need to set livna-config-display's "active" state to 
"off". I know it's not the best behavior form a user friendlyness 
perspective, but it's the only option as otherwise, this situation will 
become pretty common:
1. User runs "yum update" and grabs the latest kernel without kmod
2. User shuts down for the night
3. User powers up next morning
4. Kmod doesn't exist for new kernel, "nvidia-config-display disable" called
5. Drivers are never re-enabled

By having the nvidia service call "nvidia-config-display enable" by default 
and "nvidia-config-display disable" when a kmod is missing, we can have the 
nvidia driver automatically disable itself when a kmod is missing and then 
re-enable itself for the user when the appropriate kmod is installed.

Stewart