[mythtv-users] Nvidia Upgrade Agony

[Larry Kennedy]

I'm running myth 0.26.1-296 on EL6 (2.6.32-431.el6.i686) with a GT210 card
and the nvidia 319.32 driver.

About a week ago, I accidentally took an update to my Xorg server (now I
have xorg-x11-server-Xorg-1.15.0-25.el6.centos.i686), and after that I
started getting a driver mismatch error (ABI 15 I seem to recall).  Anyway,
I've seen this before, and I believe this means the nvidia 319 driver is at
a lower version than is needed, so I figured all I need is an nvidia
upgrade. If I remember right, the driver from atrpms was still far enough
behind to cause the ABI 15 error, so I tried kmod-nvidia from elrepo.
After removing the old nvidia 319 driver, this update pulled in these
nvidia libraries:

nvidia-x11-drv-340.65-1.el6.elrepo.i686
kmod-nvidia-340.65-1.el6.elrepo.i686

There is no nvidia kmdl rpm installed now (as was the case before), so I am
not sure if this is a problem or not.  When I start the desktop, everything
seems fine, and apps like Mozilla work, but none of the myth GUIs will
start.  I get a segmentation fault with both the mythfrontend and
mythtv-setup. Even with --verbose, mythfrontend gives me nothing to work
with.

As a test, I also tried doing the nvidia upgrade using scrpms.  With this
upgrade, I was forced to move up to kernel-2.6.32-504.3.3.el6.i686, so at
least I know this update is pulling in an nvidia-kmdl, unlike kmod.  In the
end, this upgrade attempt was less successful than the kmod upgrade in that
the nvidia driver is never able to load, so the desktop never starts. At
the bottom of Xorg.0.log it shows this:

[    20.723] (II) LoadModule: "nvidia"
[    20.723] (WW) Warning, couldn't open module nvidia
[    20.723] (II) UnloadModule: "nvidia"
[    20.723] (II) Unloading nvidia
[    20.723] (EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (module does not exist, 0)
[    20.723] (EE) No drivers available.
[    20.723] (EE) Fatal server error:
[    20.723] (EE) no screens found(EE)
[    20.723] (EE) Please consult the CentOS support at
http://wiki.centos.org/Documentation

This seems odd since "modprobe nvidia" succeeds.  I tried nvidia-xconfig to
recreate the xorg.conf, but no go. Of course I am rebooting every time to
get a clean start.  After many attempts, it looks like kmod-nvidia 340.65
may be my best option.

Is anyone aware of an issue with mythtv 0.26 and the nvidia 340.xx driver?
Alternatively, if anyone has ideas on how to get the scrpms nvidia driver
to work, I am open to trying that again too.

I have options, but nothing looks good.  Downgrading Xorg seems
problematic, so I didn't go there. I suppose I could upgrade myth to
version 0.27 and see what happens, but that presents some difficulty on EL6
(although I know that scrpms has compiled both myth 0.27 and the compatible
version of Qt). It also triggers multiple myth upgrades for BE-FE
compatibility. Another option is to go to EL7, but that requires a decent
effort too since there is no good upgrade-in-place from EL6 32-bit to EL7).

I apologize in advance if this post is somewhat schizophrenic.  I can
provide more details if anyone can lend a hand.

Larry
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