[mythtv-users] Nvidia Upgrade Agony

[Dave Ulrick]

On Sun, 28 Dec 2014, 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).

You might be suffering from the same problem I hit a week ago when I ran a 
'yum update' on one of my Fedora 20 frontends: a mismatch in the driver 
version numbers in the kernel module vs. the X11 module. I suspect that 
there might be a packaging issue with RPMFusion's latest NVidia RPMs.

I got my frontend back up and running by removing the *nvidia* RPMs and 
downloading & installing the NVidia driver (340.65) directly from NVidia's 
Web site. I opted to register the kernel module with DKMS so in theory I 
should be able to stick with this driver until/unless a kernel change 
breaks the DKMS kernel module build.

FYI, my frontend is a mini PC with NVidia ION onboard:

# lspci |grep VGA
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF119M [GeForce GT 
520M] (rev a1)

and my MythTV version is 0.27 from the RPMFusion RPMs.

Dave
-- 
Dave Ulrick
Email: d-ulrick at comcast.net