[NTLUG:Discuss] nVidia and Suse 9.3

[Chris Cox]

Justin M. Forbes wrote:
> On Thu, Jul 28, 2005 at 11:44:01PM -0500, Chris Cox wrote:
>>Bobby Wrenn wrote:
>>>Well nVidia just lost another customer. I have been trying to get the 
>>>nVidia card to work with Suse 9.3 X86_64. Every thing I find on the 
>>>nVidia Linux forum indicates it will not work. Does anyone have a 
>>>recommendation for a 8X AGP video card with composite out that will 
>>>support dual monitors on Suse 9.3?
> While I do not run Suse at all, their kernel is not *that* far from
> mainline.  I have run the nvidia 64bit drivers in rpath Linux and know
> others who have run them in Fedora core.  What sort of issues are you
> running into, and which driver are you trying to run?
> 
>>What will I be losing out by using a 32bit kernel?  Very
>>little.  I only have 2G of ram.
>>
> Actually, you are missing out on 50% of your CPUs available registers, and
> likely the prefetch enhancements.  Additionally you are missing out on
> proper numa support for your opteron platform.  What it all adds up to is a
> large chunk of performance.  What compatibility issues are you running
> into? It is something we should look at fixing.  If it is graphics related,
> nvidia did add 32bit GL support to the 64bit drivers, so you are no longer
> stuck with software GL for 32bit apps.  If it is something else, we should
> fix it.  I know several distros do not have multilib setup properly, but
> even with Fedora I could run 32bit firefox and Openoffice.  With everything
> else 64bit, that amounted to a fully functional system.  With rpath we have
> much more sane multilib handling in conary (as opposed to rpm or dpkg),
> which means there is not any 32bit app I have come accross that I could not
> easily run.

Thanks for the info.  Maybe I missed the benchmarks showing the massive
performance gains with numa, etc... The driver issues are mainly with
proprietary drivers.... Nvidia WAS an example, but their support is
getting there (though the nvnews.net forums still show some issues).
Cisco VPN, digi and some others probably not there yet.

Again, I ran 64-bit for awhile... but the little things (broken things)
made life too messy for me.  So I went back to let 64-bit AMD bake
a little while longer.  I didn't feel that much of a performance loss,
but then again, we're talking about AMD 64-bit support pre-Justin
Forbes, know that I mean? (SUSE 9.1 I think it was)

Again... I was thinking about helping out by taking my machine to SUSE 9.3,
64bit but I just have a terrible feeling that eventually, I'll be back
at the 32bit version AGAIN (I can almost guarantee it).

The world is much bigger than FF/Thunderbird/OOo.  If I knew that
CrossOver Office/VMware/Cedega/etc. would all work flawlessly with
the 64bit kernel, I'd feel more comfortable.... but those tend to
be things that are on the bottom of the priority list for most
kernel/app developers.  Who knows about running Office 2000/XP apps
which aren't 64-bit ready??

So... the question is:  Justin, just how much DO you run on your
Opteron?

I really do appreciate your feedback... hope things are going well at
rpath.