Arch Linux

nwhsvc

Member

Registered: 2012-03-23

Posts: 7

Different drivers for different Nvidia GPUs in the same system

I have the following two video cards installed in my Arch Linux system:

$ lspci | grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G84 [Quadro FX 1700] (rev a1)
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF100 [Tesla C2050 / C2070] (rev a3)

I am interested in using the Quadro FX 1700 for the display with the open
source Nouveau driver.  I want to use the Tesla C2070 card for CUDA development
using the NVIDIA driver.

Currently, I am using the nvidia and nvidia-utils packages for both the
display and CUDA.  However, I get better display stability when I am using
Nouveau.  If I install the package xf86-video-nouveau and comment out the
blacklist in /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf, then nouveau appears to take
over both cards.  In this state nvidia-smi returns the following:

$ nvidia-smi
NVIDIA: could not open the device file /dev/nvidiactl (No such file or directory).
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with NVIDIA driver. Make sure that latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

Is it possible to "attach" Nouveau only to the Quadro and let the Nvidia driver
pick up the Tesla?