[NTLUG:Discuss] nVidia and Suse 9.3

[Justin M. Forbes]

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.

Justin M. Forbes
Kernel Engineer
rpath, Inc.
http://wiki.conary.com