260.19.06 Can't create vdp device

[JoJo19]

After installing 260.19.06 I ran qvdpautest and got the error:
The following error occured: Can't create vdp device : unsupported GPU?
With versions before 260 I have no problem.
vdpauinfo gives: Error creating VDPAU device: 23

[Stephen Warren]

JoJo19,

Please can you run the following command in a terminal, and then run your VDPAU application in the same terminal. This will print some extra debugging information that should help diagnose the problem. Also, can you please say which driver version you had installed before that worked. Thanks.

export VDPAU_NVIDIA_TRACE=1
export VDPAU_NVIDIA_DEBUG=3

[JoJo19]

Working driver versions were 195.xx and 256.xx.
For everyday use I take only 195.30, because of the
known problems of later versions with xine.
I did the exports before starting the first bug report, but not in the same terminal.
So now I attach bug reports for again qvdpautest and for xine with the exports in the same terminal.

qvdpautest:
VDPAU nvidia: Version: NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library 260.19.06 Mon Sep 13 07:05:35 PDT 2010
VDPAU nvidia: Error detected 0 462
VDPAU nvidia: Backtrace:
--: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb5f64000] DSO load base
00: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb5f7445c]
01: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb5f7730c] vdp_imp_device_create_x11

vdpauinfo:
VDPAU nvidia: Version: NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library 260.19.06 Mon Sep 13 07:05:35 PDT 2010
VDPAU nvidia: Error detected 0 462
VDPAU nvidia: Backtrace:
--: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb72c1000] DSO load base
00: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb72d145c]
01: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb72d430c] vdp_imp_device_create_x11
Error creating VDPAU device: 23
display: :0.0 screen: 0

xine:
VDPAU nvidia: Version: NVIDIA VDPAU Driver Shared Library 260.19.06 Mon Sep 13 07:05:35 PDT 2010
VDPAU nvidia: Error detected 0 462
VDPAU nvidia: Backtrace:
--: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb57ef000] DSO load base
00: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb57ff45c]
01: /usr/lib/libvdpau_nvidia.so [0xb580230c] vdp_imp_device_create_x11
vo_vdpau: Can't create vdp device : unsupported GPU?
main: video driver <vdpau> failed

[Stephen Warren]

JoJo19,

Are you sure that this failure is 100% correlated with the new driver? The failure in question is a call to malloc() - the system's memory allocation function. In 260.*, this is probably the very first allocation that VDPAU ever makes, whereas in earlier drivers, this allocation was made later during initialization. This implies that this particular allocation is more likely to work successfully in 260.* than earlier drivers, not less. This indicates that your system is running low on memory.

[Stephen Warren]

JoJo19,

I think we've found the source of the problem. The size of that particular allocation significantly increased between 256.* and 260.* as part of support for Xinerama. Given the amount of physical RAM in your machine, it's unlikely the new size can be allocated on your machine. We'll look into ways of making this more dynamic to reduce memory usage.

[JoJo19]

Does this depend only on physical RAM (I have 512 MB), or would increasing the swap partition help? And if yes, would it make sense or would it be too slow?

[Stephen Warren]

Adding a couple GB of swap might help. The access to the allocated RAM is fairly sparse, so you might get acceptable results.

[JoJo19]

Could you please tell how much swap is necessary as a minimum?
It is not easy for me to make some free space on that hard drive for that, so I would like to know.
And thank you for all the information.

And btw Xinerama is disabled in my xorg.conf, is this not honored?

[Stephen Warren]

We've identified and fixed this bug. The fix will be included in a future driver release.

You'll probably need 1-2G of free swap (free, not total size) with this bug. However, it's probable that performance will significantly suffer due to this bug, so it'd be simplest to use an earlier driver, and wait for the bug fix to be released, rather than risking re-partitioning your disk.

[JoJo19]

I see. So I´ll wait for the next release.
Thanks a lot.

[mlord]

Originally Posted by JoJo19

Could you please tell how much swap is necessary as a minimum?
It is not easy for me to make some free space on that hard drive for that, so I would like to know.

Use a swap file, rather than a swap partition. That way you don't have to rearrange the drive at all.
Eg. Create/use a 2GB swapfile as follows:

hdparm --fallocate 2000000 /swapfile ## (kilo-bytes)
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

[JoJo19]

Yes, with a 1 GB swapfile it works (as far as I can tell after few tests only).