Video is slow

[Harald Hoyer]

On 08/26/2013 09:20 AM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> On Sun, 25 Aug 2013 22:12:34 -0700
> Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
>> On 08/25/2013 09:21 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
>>> While I respect Joe Zeff as a reputable member of this list, those
>>> instructions on fedoraforum are a total piece of crap. I don't know
>>> who wrote those instructions, but overengineering a solution for a
>>> common problem is a always a Recipe For Disaster(tm).
>>
>> Don't forget that some of them were written for newcomers who may or
>> may not know if their card's even supported.  Once you have rpmfusion
>> set up, all you really need to do is have yum install kmod-nvidia,
>> the xorg files that it needs, run dracut and reboot.  (Using akmod,
>> of course, gives you a slightly different set of files.)  Most of the
>> complexity comes from the author having to take all sorts of
>> possibilities into account; as a user, you just pick the set of
>> instructions that matches you card.  I've never yet had them fail,
>> but I have read posts on that forum where others have; usually,
>> they've either picked the wrong set of files to install or didn't
>> follow the instructions correctly.  YMMV, and obviously does, but
>> everything I've seen, both personally and through threads on
>> fedoraforum lead me to believe that they're about as good a set of
>> instructions as you're likely to find.
>>
>> BTW, Marco, do you have a link to a set of instructions you find
>> better? If so, I'd be interested in looking at them and possibly
>> pointing others to them instead in the future.
> 
> I don't have a link to point you to, aside from my first answer to
> Roger above (that link can be found in the list archives).
> 
> But it literally boils down to three steps:
> 
> (1) activate rpmfusion,
> (2) yum install kmod-nvidia,
> (3) reboot the machine.
> 
> Feel free to substitute akmod in place of kmod if you wish.
> 
> With those in mind, if you want to write down an instruction manual, I
> can say only this:
> 
> * Give the user a link to rpmfusion website, and let him figure out how
>   to activate it, if he didn't already. Giving him some ugly rpm
>   --nogpgcheck install http://blabla stuff is a bad idea on several
>   grounds, but most importantly the rpmfusion website is the
>   authoritative reference on how to activate it, and there is no need
>   to reinvent instructions that already exist.
> 
> * The yum installation of (a)kmod-nvidia will pull in any dependencies
>   it needs, including xorg libs, -header and -devel packages, even gcc
>   if necessary. There is no need to specify any of those manually.
> 
> * The nouveau is being disabled and dracut is being run as part of the
>   post-install scripts for kmod-nvidia. Neither of those should be done
>   manually. Especially not by a newbie.
> 
> * Any of the remaining stuff about PAE kernels, selinux policies, grub
>   tweaking and manually blacklisting nouveau should be frown upon. Not
>   only that those things are not necessary for the installation of the
>   driver, but moreover they can be downright dangerous if handled by
>   a newbie.
> 
> There is one more thing regarding the dracut stuff --- aside from the
> fact that it is completely unnecessary since kmod-nvidia will already
> do it by itself, doing it like this:
> 
> mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname
> -r)-nouveau.img
> dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

/boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img is the default value of the first argument and
can be omitted.
$(uname -r) is the default value of the second argument and can be omitted.

So, this results in

# dracut

> 
> literally means asking for trouble. The mv command is almost
> instantaneous, while the dracut command will take a good several
> minutes to complete. In that sense, during the period after you have
> renamed a valid initramfs file to some name that grub will not know to
> look for, and before dracut has completed the new file, you do not have
> a bootable machine, since there is no initramfs file for grub to
> fallback on if something goes wrong. What will happen if a power surge
> shuts down your computer in the middle of dracut run? Doing a mv before
> dracut is a recipe to paint yourself into a corner.
> 
> What should be done instead is to first invoke dracut with a different
> file name:
> 
> dracut /boot/mynewramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

$(uname -r) is the default value of the second argument and can be omitted.

So, this results in

# dracut /boot/mynewramfs-$(uname -r).img

> 
> so that you don't touch the original file while this is being done.
> Then, you want to *copy* the current initramfs into a backup:
> 
> cp /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
> 
> Finally, you want to move the new file into the place of the old one:
> 
> mv /boot/mynewramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)
> 
> Since the file already exists, and since the root alias for mv is
> interactive, it will ask you do you really want to overwrite the old
> file. Answering yes will be fast, painless and a proof that you didn't
> make any typos in the above commands.
> 
> During the whole procedure, if the machine loses power, it has a valid
> initramfs file to fallback on automatically.
> 
> Again, all that said, yum install kmod-nvidia will will do all that
> automatically, and there is really no reason to invoke dracut manually
> in the first place. You just risk to fsck up something, like it just
> happened to Roger.
> 
> HTH, :-)
> Marko
> 
> 
> 
> 
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