From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; rv:1.7.3) Gecko/20040914 Firefox/0.10 Description of problem: With FC3 and RHEL 4, after compiling the nvidia module for a specified kernel and putting an entry for char-major-195 into modprobe.conf, the nvidia module is not automatically loaded when X is started. Using any of the following in /etc/modprobe.conf does not work: "alias char-major-195*", "alias char-major-195-*", "alias char-major-195", or "alias char-major-195-0". Running "modprobe nvidia" and then starting X works fine. This is not a problem on FC2. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. Compile the nvidia module for a kernel 2. add a char-major-195 alias into modprobe.conf for the nvidia module 3. Reboot into runlevel 5. Module does not get loaded. Additional info:
Thanks for the report. For users who are experiencing problems installing, configuring, or using the unsupported 3rd party proprietary "nvidia" video driver, Nvidia provides indirect customer support via an online web based support forum. Nvidia monitors these web forums for commonly reported problems and passes them on to Nvidia engineers for investigation. Once they've isolated a particular problem, it is often fixed in a future video driver update. The NVNews Nvidia Linux driver forum is located at: http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=14 Once you have reported this issue in the Nvidia web forums, others who may have experienced the particular problem may be able to assist. If there is a real bug occuring, Nvidia will be able to determine this, and will likely resolve the issue in a future driver update for the operating system releases that they officially support. While Red Hat does not support the proprietary nvidia driver, users requiring technical support may also find the various X.Org, XFree86, and Red Hat mailing lists helpful in finding assistance: X.Org mailing lists: http://www.freedesktop.org/XOrg/XorgMailingLists XFree86 mailing lists: http://www.xfree86.org/sos/lists.html Red Hat mailing lists: https://listman.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo Setting status to "NOTABUG" (unsupported).
Mike, I know Red Hat's party line on the NVIDIA driver, and that's fine. The reason I filed this in Red Hat's bugzilla is that it appears to me this might be an OS bug. The same NVIDIA driver loads fine with char-major-195 in FC2 and other distros, but not FC3/RHEL 4. This leads me to believe that you guys changed something in the OS that causes a char-major-195 device to not get automatically loaded. Can you say for sure this isn't an OS bug? With Red Hat's push into the desktop, too many people will be using NVIDIA OpenGL drivers to just blow this off.
RHEL4_BETA1 and also last FC3beta use udev. You can find some informations and temporary fix on http://people.redhat.com/harald/udev.html -> Current Problems on Fedora -> Nvidia I think this is an OS bug at this time which comes from udev.
The device handling is different in FC3 as udev is now used, which I hadn't previously considered when initially reviewing the report. It now appears that this is the likely cause of the problem. Thanks for the additional information, I've reopened the report and am reassigning to the "udev" component for review.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 130746 ***
Reopening this issue since the dup of this (BZ130746) has become unweildy and does not properly reflect the severity of the issue. We want to make it clear that this particular issue is an RC Blocker for Dell. Raising the severity accordingly. I am going to remove 130746 from my RC Blocker list and add this one (135932).
This really needs to be fixed by nvidia. *ALL* other X drivers load their respective (DRM) kernel modules from inside the X driver. NVidia should do that too.
Nvidia either needs to load their kernel module from inside their video driver, like all other video drivers do, as mentioned by Arjan above, or in the mean time, they need to write an initscript or some other mechanism to work around this limitation in their driver. This is not to my knowledge a udev bug at all, so I'm not sure what Red Hat is expected to do about this problem. It is a driver limitation. It might be a good idea however for Dell, Red Hat, and Nvidia to discuss this specific problem on a higher level, to make sure everyone knows what the fix is, who needs to do it, and to make sure it is done correctly and in time for whatever deadlines. Right now it just seems to be a hot potato filled with a lot of misunderstanding.
Dell team: in Amit's latest 01 Dec RHEL4ZILLA list, he lists this as an RC blocker. We agreed that although unpleasant, the problem is a limitation with the Nvidia driver rather than a udev bug. As a result, this bug is NOT on RH's RC blocker list.
Oops: my bad. Amit REMOVES this as an RC blocker, and I've done so as well.