Video is slow

[Roger]

On 26/08/13 19:01, Harald Hoyer wrote:
> 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
>>
>>
>>
>> All in all
>> I would encourage as many people to read and understand the installtion discussion. I think my initial disaster was, indeed, not understanding that rebooting could take a long time while it rebuilds the initrd...imge file.
>> I ran into issues and this series of posts should, for the future, help others thinking of using nvidia in the interim, until Nouveau is up to speed.
>> I would take this opportunity to thank Nouveau devs for tackling a huge task in reverse engineering.
>>
>> Marko, thanks, your discussion has helped me immesuarbly. I am downloading the F19 iso and hope it will linux rescue the problem and install a working .img so I can at least get into the file system.
>>
>> As for the instructions, I finally recognised them as similar to what I had used back in Fedora 14 days.
>>
>> Thank you all
>> Roger