Contributing to the Nvidia driver (RHEL/CentOS too)

[Simone Caronni]

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.
I would like to merge some (all?) of the changes listed on my repository
[1] into RPMFusion.

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


[1] http://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/
[2] https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=2681
[3]
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/331.17/README/faq.html#multikernelmodules

-- 
You cannot discover new oceans unless you have the courage to lose sight of
the shore (R. W. Emerson).

http://xkcd.com/229/
http://negativo17.org/
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