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- [b]Attention: Proprietary video driver users (ATI, Nvidia, etc.)[/b]
- [list]
- [*][i]From[/i]: "Mike A. Harris" <mharris redhat com>
- [*][i]To[/i]: For testers of Fedora Core development releases <fedora-test-list redhat com>, fedora-devel-list redhat com
- [*][i]Cc[/i]:
- [*][i]Subject[/i]: Attention: Proprietary video driver users (ATI, Nvidia, etc.)
- [*][i]Date[/i]: Wed, 22 Feb 2006 20:07:12 -0500[/list] There have been a number of bugs reported in Red Hat bugzilla against
- X which have recently been tracked down to 3rd party video drivers being
- the culprit behind the problem the user was experienced. In many of the
- cases however, it wasn't obvious that the 3rd party drivers were at
- fault because the user was actually using the Red Hat supplied drivers,
- and not using the 3rd party driver that they had previously installed.
- Since I've wasted at least 6-8 hours in the last month diagnosing issues
- of this nature which have later turned out to be caused by proprietary
- drivers having been "installed" on the system, wether they were actually
- being *used* or not, I thought I should write a short useful
- informational email on the topic to the lists to try and inform people
- of some pitfalls you may encounter if you even _install_ 3rd party
- video drivers.
- Both ATI and Nvidia, and perhaps even other 3rd party drivers out there
- come in some form of tarball or equivalent form from the particular
- vendor. Most users seem to favour the hardware vendor supplied drivers
- directly, rather than using more sanely packaged 3rd party packages that
- contain the same drivers. This is very unfortunate, because installing
- these 3rd party tarball driver installations is very harmful to your
- clean OS installation.
- Both ATI and Nvidia's proprietary video driver installation utilities
- replace the Red Hat supplied libGL library with their own libGL.
- Nvidia's driver installs a replacement libglx.a X server module,
- removing the Red Hat supplied X.Org module in the process. ATI's
- driver may or may not replace libglx.a with it's own, I haven't checked
- (but if someone could confirm that, I'd appreciate knowing for certain).
- Once you have either of these drivers installed on your system, you
- can no longer use DRI with any video card. So if you install the
- ATI fglrx driver, while you should still be able in theory at least
- to use the Red Hat supplied radeon driver, you may no longer be able
- to use DRI with the radeon driver, because ATI's driver has blown away
- critical files that come with the OS that are needed for proper
- operation.
- If you install Nvidia's driver, and later decide to install an ATI
- card, and still have Nvidia's driver installed, bang - you will not
- be able to get Red Hat supplied DRI 3D acceleration to work. You must
- remove Nvidia's driver completely from your hard disk, and completely
- reinstall all of the xorg-x11 and mesa packages, and ensure they are
- all intact by using:
- rpm -Va
- Another problem being reported by a few people, is they are unable to
- get DRI to work because mesa libGL is looking for the DRI drivers in
- the wrong directory. The claim is that mesa is looking for the DRI
- drivers in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules.
- On a fresh OS install however, my findings are that mesa's libGL very
- much is not looking in /usr/X11R6 for it's modules. It is looking in
- the proper location of /usr/lib/dri for the modules. Why then is it
- looking in the wrong place on some systems?
- Answer: Because of fglrx having been installed. If you have had a
- previous OS release installed, and have installed ATI's fglrx driver
- from tarball, it has removed the OS supplied libGL et al and made
- backup copies of them aparently. Now you do an OS upgrade which works
- properly and installs everything in the right place. Then you uninstall
- ATI's fglrx with whatever script or whatever they supply, and now you
- try to run X, and get no DRI!
- Well, since you don't have fglrx installed at all, it must be our
- OS at fault right! Wrong. the uninstall script has put the OLD
- libGL it backed up (from FC4 or whatever) back in the system,
- overwriting the new FC5 supplied libGL in the process, and since
- ATI's fglrx driver is DRI based as well, it looks for the DRI
- modules in the wrong place now.
- Conclusions:
- If you are going to use any 3rd party proprietary drivers, please do
- yourself and everyone else a huge favour, and at least get your
- drivers from reputable 3rd party rpm package repositories such as
- livna.org which packages both the nvidia and ati proprietary drivers
- in rpm packages which install the drivers sanely without overwriting
- Red Hat/Fedora supplied files. These 3rd party packages install
- the files in alternative locations, and configure the X server et al.
- appropriately so that everything works. Since they do not blow
- away OS supplied files, you can use the OS supplied drivers still
- by reconfiguring xorg.conf. Also, if you decide to uninstall the
- 3rd party drivers via rpm, they just go away and cause no further
- harm to the system. So PLEASE USE THIRD PARTY RPM PACKAGES if you
- _must_ use 3rd party drivers. It helps create world peace.
- If you choose to install ATI or Nvidia tarball/whatever drivers
- directly from ATI/Nvidia (or any other vendor for that matter), your
- system is 100% completely and totally unsupported. Even if you are
- using _our_ drivers, your 3rd party driver installation may have
- blown away our libGL, our libglx.a or any other files that have been
- supplied by our OS. As such, your system is not supported.
- For those who encounter a bug of any kind whatsoever while using
- 3rd party video drivers, completely remove the 3rd party drivers
- from your system, and then perform a full "yum update" to ensure
- you have the latest Fedora Core supplied X packages installed. After
- doing this, do an "rpm -Va" of your whole system, in particular the
- xorg-x11-*, mesa-* and lib* packages. If there are any discrepancies
- found in any of the Fedora supplied packages, in particular in libGL,
- or the X server packages, remove them and reinstall them and reverify
- that the files installed on your system are the ones shipped by
- Fedora.
- If you are able to reproduce the problem you are having after having
- performed these steps, and having ensured that you are neither using
- 3rd party drivers, nor even have them installed, then feel free to
- file a bug report in bugzilla.
- By doing this small amount of pre-diagnosis of your own system if
- you are using 3rd party drivers, you will save yourself a lot of
- headaches, and will save other people, including developers such
- as myself from wasting endless hours trying to diagnose problems
- which turn out to be bogus. Hours which could have been spent
- fixing legitimate bugs that are present in bugzilla.
- As an additional note - if anyone is using proprietary drivers and
- has any problems which they believe might actually be a bug in
- Xorg and not in their proprietary driver - file such bugs directly
- in X.Org bugzilla. X.Org has an nVidia (closed) component specifically
- for the proprietary driver, and Nvidia engineers get those bugs and
- will investigate them over time.
- Anyhow, I hope this helps people understand at least some of the
- problems that can occur when you opt to using 3rd party drivers,
- present some alternatives, and to help people diagnose their own
- problems which might be caused by having installed 3rd party
- drivers.
- Thanks for reading.
- TTYL
- P.S. Feel free to forward this email on to any other lists or
- people whom you think might benefit from it. Also, if anyone thinks
- this information would be useful to have on the Fedora Wiki or
- somewhere else, feel free to copy my email into a wiki page, or
- paraphrase, etc.
- --
- Mike A. Harris,
- Systems Engineer, X11 Development team,
- Red Hat Canada, Ltd.
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上面是 官方的开发人员对在 系统上安装第三方驱动程序的忠告.我觉得很好,所以发过来,,现存在这里,大家现凑和着看看,,谁有时间的话,可以帮忙翻译一下重点段落. |
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