Installation of legacy nvidia legacy drivers with Rocky9.6

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

I was pleased to find that Rocky 9.2 with Mate Desktop would still run my legacy Nvidia K4000 and Nvidia 3D Vision glasses. I do drug design research and need 3D stereo to examine receptors and fit electron density. When updates came out for Rocky up to 9.5, the Nvidia driver still would install and I could run 3D stereo. But in 9.6 the driver would not compile. NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02.run I cannot install the ‘latest’ drivers since this is legacy board and I cannot get 3D running on Centos or any other OS. Also, I use X11 for display. When I run the nvidia driver installer under 9.6 it complains about unified cuda memory problem. When I go back to my 9.5 install all works well.

Will there be a fix for this legacy driver, either from Nvidia (no longer supported) or from Rocky? If necessary I may need to accept 9.5 for the rest of the hardware life.

Any help would be appreciated.

thanks

Love that Rocky version with Mate desktop

2

RPM Fusion has RPM packages for the 470. See Making sure you're not a bot!

The Mate is a necessity more than a bonus; gdm and Gnome require Composite extension for X11 and the traditional 3D stereo modes are mutually exclusive with Composite.

3

RPM fusion does not work. It installs the 570 version of the driver and not the 470 version. nvidia-smi says 570 is installed but the board is a K4000 and will not work. When I try to install the 470 version from nvidia, it says an error has occured and did not install. So I am left with no choices. I tried to install 6.5, but the 470 driver needs source files and there are no souce files for 9.5 to install. Instead it installes 9.6 source files which won’t work. Still looking to fix this. Does V 10.0 of Rocky support legacy drivers?

4

You did the

dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx akmod-nvidia-470xx

?

5

Error: Transaction test error:
file /usr/lib64/libEGL_nvidia.so.0 from install of xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx-libs-3:470.256.02-1.el9.x86_64 conflicts with file from package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-3:570.172.08-2.el9.x86_64
file /usr/lib64/libGLESv1_CM_nvidia.so.1 from install of xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-470xx-libs-3:470.256.02-1.el9.x86_64 conflicts with file from package xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-3:570.172.08-2.el9.x86_64

and a few more of these errors. I have to completely remove all of 570.

6

I did the following and it removed all 570 and allowed me to install 470:

sudo dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-3:570.172.08-2.el9.x86_64

thanks I will check out to see if it works.

7

I thought I replied. But this isntall of 470xx worked and my Nvidia 3D vision glasses are now working.

2 Likes
8

OOOPs. Spoke too soon. I actually was using 9.5, which works with K4000 driver. Update to 9.6 and the driver is still broken under Mate desktop. On conversion to GDM, I get graphics and even 3D with my glasses (with compositor use) in Pymol, but this is the problem with Gnome. I get ‘stereo in a desktop’ and not ‘stereo in a window’. Mate will allow ‘stereo in a window’ with the compositor disabled in xorg.conf. Gnome gives met 2 Wayland logins and 2 X11 logins. The X11 login allows me to run 3D with the compositor in charge of display. The ‘stereo in a desktop’ is designed to please the VR users since the whole experience needs to be 3D. But ‘stereo in a window’ only allows one window at a time to be 3D. GDM results in flashes of unstable background and windows eventual leading to crash.

9

Both GDM and Gnome do require the composite extension. Some newer applications do use “very recent” GL extensions that allow some 3D stereo.

The older applications depend on the old “quad-buffered stereo” functions that do not work with composite extension.

Mate does not require the composite extension. Lightdm does not require it either.
The workstations that we still have with 3D Stereo support do all have Lightdm and Mate,
rather than GDM and Gnome.

10

Are you running 9.5 or 9.6 of Rocky? What video cards are you usning? Thanks

11

At ELRepo, we have a kmod-nvidia-470xx driver for EL9.6. It only supports X11, but I’ve tested it with a Quadro P1000 and GTX 1660 Ti.

12

OK Rocky9.6 works with Mate desktop (and thus Nvidia 3D Vision glasses) if you follow the instructions in

For 9.6 I had to reinstall Mate as described in part 2 “MATE after OS install” since there is no live install of 9.6 with MATE desktop.

Happy again with my K4000 and 3D glasses.

1 Like
13

p.s. Make sure you disable the compositor in xorg.conf.

Section “Extensions”
Option “COMPOSITE” “Disable”
EndSection

Then restart X11 (logout and back in). Test it with

pymol-3.1.3 -S

or chimerax

https://www.cgl.ucsf.edu/chimerax/cgi-bin/secure/chimerax-get.py?file=1.10.1/centos-9/ucsf-chimerax-1.10.1-1.el9.x86_64.rpm

14

You can get a stereo test script from here

stereotest-x1164

64-bit Linux program, should run on Debian 4 (GLIBC 2.0) or later.

A square will appear and will be magenta if stereo is working. Left eye is red. Right eye is blue.

15

UPDATE: ELRepo kmod-nvidia-470xx now supports Wayland.

For EL9, we are intentionally keeping it in the testing repo since it may stop working at any EL 9.x release.

1 Like
16

Why is my GLX vendor MESA when it should be Nvidia? Did I not install the akmod 470xx driver correctly on my K4000 Nvidia card? I am missing some libs for GLX. How do I get them from rpmfusion?

17

That is a question for RPM Fusion.

I do know that the ELRepo driver mentioned above does give glx version 1.4 from NVidia.

For ELRepo (on “clean” Rocky, but with lightdm and MATE – no gdm), something like:

dnf install elrepo-release
dnf config-manager --enable elrepo-testing
dnf install kmod-nvidia-470xx
cat > /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/11-mystereo.conf <<EOF
Section "Extensions"
        Option "COMPOSITE" "Disable"
EndSection
Section "Device"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Option      "Stereo" "10"
EndSection
EOF
systemctl reboot

would be a start. (The “10” is for 3DVision USB emitter.)

18

I believe we used “Stereo” “7”

for CRT displays.

19

Appendix B. X Config Options says that 7 is for passive horizontal interlaced stereo mode.

IIRC, we had 3 with CRT and StereoGraphics glasses, and now 10 with NVidia 3D Vision glasses (until they all break down).

20

On another legacy computer I tried the akmod-nvidia-470xx install but I get a Nvidia lib incompatible.

satyshur@t1diabetes ~]$ nvidia-smi
Failed to initialize NVML: Driver/library version mismatch
NVML library version: 575.57

yet the lib should be 470

There must have been an old install of the 575 lib that was not deleted when the 470 was written.

How do I fix the mismatch?