The nv driver and GeForce 7100 (Was: F10 on Homebuilt Box - Absolutely Brutal...!!!!)

[Christopher A. Williams]

On Wed, 2008-11-19 at 11:18 -0500, Adam Jackson wrote:
<snip...>

> Alright, I've got a (bad) fix for this.  Not the final fix I want to
> use, but I'd at least appreciate some testing from people with this kind
> of nv driver failure.  It's actually an X server fix, and it can be
> found here:
> 
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/scratch/ajax/task_940170/
> 
> Run X, either with no config file or with nv selected as the driver in
> the config, and then verify in the X log that we fell back to vesa.  I
> don't have one of the affected nv chips so I had to synthesize the
> failure by hacking the nv driver, but it should work.  Probably.

OK - I tested this out as prescribed. Here are my results:

Running with no xorg.conf file:
We try to load the nv driver and fail, then we SUCCESSFULLY fall back to
vesa! Yaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy!!!!!

Running with xorg.conf file that is _specifically_ set to use the nv
driver:
We try to load the nv driver and fail. No fallback to vesa. If we tried
to fall back to vesa, it didn't work.

Overall, I would call this a success.

Keeping in mind that we won't have an xorg.conf file by default, the fix
works as currently implemented (and should therefore work on the Live CD
and Install DVD). Explicitly configuring the nv driver, IMHO, _should_
produce a failure since it isn't supported on this card.

Given that the nv driver is known not to support this specific card, I
would perhaps just consider throwing some sort of error message which
makes it blatantly clear from the start that this is the case (same for
any other non-supported cards). Perhaps adding some professionally
worded verbiage that we should appeal to nVidia to help change that
would also be appropriate. From a usability perspective, we shouldn't
need to go digging through the Xorg error logs to figure all of that
out.

One more thing to consider: If X does fail to load, we need to do
something other than sit at a blank screen doing nothing - especially on
the Live images. It makes us look silly. I think what may be happening
here is that X is failing, but we're going ahead and trying to load gdm
anyway. That doesn't make a lot of sense. If X fails to start properly,
it should exit and gdm should not be allowed to start. We should allow
the X failure error message to fall through and then drop to a text mode
command prompt. This has the added benefit of giving people the
opportunity to fix problems with X and then trying again.

Let me know when you want to test the final fix you do want to use.

Cheers,

Chris

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In practice there is."

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