[OpenIndiana-discuss] Updated NVIDIA drivers

[Reginald Beardsley]

The first step is to determine what HW is present, What I am offering to do is to write a script which run at single user level will determine the model of graphics card installed. I shall also build the table for the nVidia cards so that it returns the correct driver filename. If that proceeds well I'll build tables for other vendors and cards.

These are *all* identified by vendor and board. So a tuple of (vendor, board, driver) is all that is needed for the distro. The drivers should all be in a single file structure rooted at /<...>/graphics/ with <vendor>/ below that in the distro DVD filesystem. There is *no* plausible reason for an installer to have to search for components.

I've not investigated the installer. As noted previously, when I configured my Ultra 20 as a build system and asked for instructions on how to install the result in a BE I got *no* reply at all on either dev list. It was a considerable amount of effort to get it to build, all of which turned out to be a waste of time. So I am going to limit my efforts to small projects until such time as I get consistent cooperation such that my efforts are effective.

For what is being done, the current installer takes an inordinate amount of time. It would be *much* faster if the standard install components were unpacked and repackaged as a single tar or cpio archive. Only a small fraction of the DVD capacity is being used. So an extra copy of everything is of no consequence except to download. I'm on a 3 Mb/s link which barely does that reliably. It's not an issue for me to download a 4.4 GB ISO. For people on measured links we could easily provide a minimal disk. That is already being done to some degree, but the images for the text and GUI installer are inconsistent as I noted previously.

OI has a *very* small user base. For it to grow the install needs to be better than the other options. 

 For a disk capacity package (~2 GB in 1992) the installer I wrote was less than 200 lines. I also shipped an uninstall script that would restore the system to its exact state prior to the install which was of similar size. At that point in time, the install stuff for Matlab was 15,000 lines! And did not work properly on a standard Solaris target.

In my email to Matlab support I wrote, "I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Some people write operating systems in fewer lines."

If my proposed project goes well at the OI end, I'll take on more *small* well defined tasks. I sent an email to Toomas about this previously which got lost in the shuffle until I sent a query.

Good installers are not large or difficult. But they require extraordinary care and testing. I've done a bunch of them.

Let's get the nVidia driver selection done and then we can discuss the next steps.

Regards,
Reg


On Saturday, March 13, 2021, 06:28:31 AM CST, Stephan Althaus <stephan.althaus at duedinghausen.eu> wrote:


Hello!

The current state was one single step forward to at least *have* more
than one single driver version. Let us the next steps follow up.

A script to find a drinver at source level would be doing something like

*$ find ~/src/oi-userland/components/openindiana/ -name
"driver-graphics-nvidia*.p5m" -exec grep -iH 638 {} \;*
/home1/home/steven/src/oi/hoewweken/oi-userland/components/openindiana/*nvidia-340*/driver-graphics-nvidia.p5m:
alias="pci10de,638" \

or

*$ find ~/src/oi-userland/components/openindiana/ -name
"driver-graphics-nvidia*.p5m" -exec grep -iH 13b6 {} \;*
/home1/home/steven/src/oi/hoewweken/oi-userland/components/openindiana/*nvidia-390*/driver-graphics-nvidia-390.p5m:
alias="pci10de,13b6" \
/home1/home/steven/src/oi/hoewweken/oi-userland/components/openindiana/*nvidia-460*/driver-graphics-nvidia-460.p5m:
alias="pci10de,13b6" \

.. and extract the appopriate driver version from the filenames given.

An other idea would be to create a map (pciid,drivername) at build time
for an install script.

But i don't know how to integrate this into the build system nor at
packaging level. At least up to know. And i am of the opinion that
learning never stops, anyway :-)

Greetings,

Stephan



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