[mythtv-users] Nvidia Upgrade Agony

[Andrew C. (AFPup) Stadt]

On 14-12-28 04:08 PM, Larry Kennedy wrote:
> 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
>
>
Just a shot in the dark here, but did you update the necessary gl(x) 
libraries at the same time?  If you could get to a desktop but Myth 
segfaults (and you're using the OpenGL painter, there might be some 
library mismatch or whatnot.

You can always do a "glxinfo | head -4", should show something like:
name of display: :0.0
display: :0  screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation

Don't run EL so not sure what the "correct" method of this is.

HTH,

Andrew