Comments on: NVIDIA binary driver on Xen-enabled Linux x86_64

By: laing

laing — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 17:57:56 +0000

You don’t need a patch to get the nvidia driver working with a xen kernel. Here’s how I do it:
First download and install the nvidia driver under a NON-xen kernel. The driver can be obtained from the nvidia unix drivers portal page at: http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html. This process should be fairly self explanatory.
Next boot your xen kernel and extract the nvidia driver source tree from the file you downloaded and installed above: (eg. NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-xxx.xx.xx-pkg2.run -a -x)
Now change to the newly created directory: cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-xxx.xx.xx-pkg2/usr/src/nv
Build your driver module as follows: IGNORE_XEN_PRESENCE=y make SYSSRC=/lib/mod
ules/`uname -r`/build module
Next you make a home for the newly built module and copy it to the right place:
mkdir /lib/modules/`uname -r`/video
cp -ip nvidia.ko /lib/modules/`uname -r`/video/
Now load the driver as follows: depmod -a
Now restart your display manager so it will try to load X again with the video driver in place:
killall -HUP gdm-binary
In a few seconds you should be up and running. Have fun.

By: sbeam

sbeam — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 18:31:07 +0000

Michael, get a hold of yourself. Xen is a relatively new tech and Nvidia is a company that goes to lengths to support Linux, its just that there is a gap in support for Xen kernels. You are probably using the open source ATI drivers which have been updated. Maybe you should take your complaint up with nvidia, not troll around bashing the whole OS because you had to learn something.

If you can’t handle the simple instructions in this howto then yes you should be using a Mac and being satisfied with simple stuff. Plenty of professionals and smart people use linux, it works for those of us who are capable of understanding how to use it.

By: Michael M - Moron

Michael M - Moron — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 23:44:52 +0000

Way to keep it on topic Michael M. Go and whinge someplace else, what do you hope to achieve with such pessimism and negativity?

By: Michael M

Michael M — Sat, 24 May 2008 06:04:36 +0000

Once again,Linux earns an F. I understand all the arguments about who is responsible,but the long and the short of it is,my time is valuable and these kinds of problems show that linux simply isn’t ready for prime time. Yes,I CAN make it work,but having to install three times and then Google some obscure patch to make functionality that is supposed to work,actually be usable is just ridiculous.
For all its faults,windows actually does work out of the box on most hardware. If you need Unix,there are allways Macs,which once again,work,in fact many say they work better than windows,but of course Apple controls the hardware. There is of course also Solaris,which I have very few problems installing on both Sun and commodity hardware. Yet we are still told that somehow linux is a viable option for real professional uses. I just dont see it.

BTW, This is a “junk” ,machine made from spare parts,buts rather up to date,core 2 duo e6600,ecs 945p motherboard, 3gigs of ram and an NVIDIA graphics card,which I bought because all the linux fanboys say it has better support than ATI,which coincindentally,’works’ in Xen with no crazy patches. Of course getting it to work at all took quite a bit of work,but thats another story.

By: Paul

Paul — Fri, 14 Mar 2008 14:46:44 +0000

This patch doesn’t work on the latest RHEL 5.1 Xen Kernel 2.6.18-53.1.13.el5.

The nvidia_xenpatch on the latest NVIDIA-Linux-X86_64-169.12 driver failed to apply. The path did apply on the NVIDIA-Linux-X86_64-10-9639 driver, and tried the xorg.conf example and also using the nvidia-xconfig script, but both gave me the â€œcould not open the device file /dev/nvidia0 (Input/output error)â€, although the device file exists.

By: Drew Farris

Drew Farris — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 19:46:53 +0000

Thanks for the great instructions.

I confirmed that this works with CentOS 5 with NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-9755 and kernel 2.6.18-8.1.8.el5xen and a Quadro NVS280 on a Dell Dimension 470n, but it is very slow because MTRR are used instead of PAT.

I will be better off running a non-xen kernel and hosting my xen instances on another headless machine.

By: Luis Torres

Luis Torres — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 15:05:36 +0000

Did anyone try this under different Linux distros and is willing to share the experience? I am interested in knowing about Scientific Linux 5.0 (latest kernel 2.6.18-8.1.8). Thanks.

By: Gerhard Lehmann

Gerhard Lehmann — Sun, 22 Jul 2007 15:30:20 +0000

Yes! I really thought getting a new video card. Trying over two days to install any driver without succes. I’m very happy that this works now. Thank you.

By: Axel Olmos

Axel Olmos — Thu, 21 Jun 2007 21:48:47 +0000

This works. Thank you so much. So far, this version of the Nvidia driver also seems to be more stable on my AMD X2 than newer versions.