4180 vs 3123 drivers - generic nv or nvidia.o branch??

[wsanders]

OK did I download the right stuff? I got tarballs of Athlon drivers, NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-4180 and NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4180 - these packages are

1) Not precompiled RPMs (OK, I can deal with that)

2) The new driver is nv.o and not nvidia.o, right? Is the 4180 version a new branch of the "generic" nv driver? Or a update to the NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-3123 nvidia.o driver I already have?

The old generic nv driver works fine with my MX400 but doesn't support GL. The 3123 nvidia.o is faster - but it's started crashing a lot.

I guess I'm asking "which is more stable? The 3123 nvidia.o or the 4180 nv.o?

[wsanders]

(This is RH7.3 with gcc 2.96)

OK now I see something, the NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4180 tarball attempts to produce a module named nv-kernel.o and the NVIDIA_GLX-1.0-4180 tarball has a precompiled module nvidia_drv.o. Yuk.

Warning: The first thing the GLX makefile does is wipe out your existing drivers without backing them up:

$ make
Removing all old and conflicting files!
rm -f //usr/lib64/libGL.*
rm -f //usr/lib64/libGLcore.*
rm -f //usr/X11R6/lib64/libGL.*
...

This package appears to have a precompiled nvidia_drv.o:

./X11R6/lib/modules/drivers:
total 600
-rwx------ 1 wsanders wsanders 609032 Dec 4 09:01 nvidia_drv.o*

I'm assuming this is the same module that the NVIDIA_kernel-1.0-4180 tarball eventually is supposed to produce, but is named nv-linux.o, instead?

Comment in GLtarball Makefile:

# this is pretty brain-dead, but should be good enough to get started

Obviously!

The kernel source make bombs off with

cc1: Invalid option `cmodel=kernel'

so I'm guessing i need gcc 3-something anyway to buildthis.

[Andy Mecham]

You've downloaded the wrong drivers. 1.0-4180 is the AMD64 (Hammer) driver. Unless you have a Hammer, you should download and install 1.0-4191 (the IA32 driver, intended for Athlon machines). Run NVchooser.sh if you're unsure of which files to download.

'nvidia.o' is the accelerated NVIDIA kernel module, and is what you're installing if you've downloaded files off of www.nvidia.com. The 'nv' driver is the opensource 2D driver provided as part of XFree86. NVIDIA does not distribute the 'nv' driver.

--andy