NVIDIA / nouveau thread branch [was Re: Fedora 12 QA retrospective - feedback needed]

[Adam Williamson]

On Wed, 2009-11-25 at 17:16 -0500, Neal Becker wrote:

> > IIRC nvidia-installer (not nvidia.ko) has detection routine to know if
> > nvidiafb is loaded, because it has produced well knwon
> > incompatiblities from the past. I wonder if they have updated it for
> > nouveau.
> > 
> > Nicolas Chauvet (kwizart)
> > 
> nouveau.modeset=0 doesn't work here, kernel says it's unknown (and ignored).  

Yes, it does work. It disables kernel modesetting. It doesn't stop the
module loading, that's not what it's intended to do. The message from
the kernel is bogus and should be ignored. See:
http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14164

> This works:
> rdblacklist=nouveau

That does something different; it stops the nouveau module being loaded
during initrd phase (it's a dracut parameter).

As I understand things currently, there seem to be some situations where
it's enough to simply stop the nouveau module doing kernel modesetting -
i.e. you just need 'nouveau.modeset=0'; even if it gets loaded in this
case, nvidia still works. In other cases, it seems, nvidia doesn't work
unless you stop nouveau being loaded entirely. I'm still not exactly
sure what's going on there.

I believe to ensure nouveau never gets loaded, you need both the
rdblacklist parameter and a blacklist directive in /etc/modprobe.d (as
the package currently installs).

-- 
Adam Williamson
Fedora QA Community Monkey
IRC: adamw | Fedora Talk: adamwill AT fedoraproject DOT org
http://www.happyassassin.net


-- 
adamw