Arch Linux

mostlyharmless

Member

Registered: 2014-01-16

Posts: 72

pacman NVIDIA driver options

There are two related questions here:

Is there a way to install the nvidia drivers with pacman that simulates the folllowing?

./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-4xx.xx.run -no-opengl-files -no-x-check

Background:  I have a system with an NVIDIA card and an ATI/Radeon.  I passthrough the NVIDIA card to a VM using KVM/vfio, but when I'm not using the VM, I like to have the card available for OpenCL.  If I use the NVIDIA installer, with the options above, everything works as I want it to.

But of course it's recommended that pacman does all the driver installations to avoid issues and simplify maintenance.  I've tried pacman -S nvidia, but of course it installs the opengl-files, which conflicts with mesa and confuses X.  It also clobbers the passthrough. 

In a related problem, using pacman -S cuda also creates issues with the VM passthrough failing, probably because it drags in nvidia-utils-4xx etc.  It'd be nice to CUDA in Arch as well, so if anyone has suggestions on how to install CUDA in this scenario, they would be welcome.

I do not use the NVIDIA card for graphics in Arch.  I use the mesa drivers for the ATI card.

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,653

Website

Re: pacman NVIDIA driver options

Take a look at the NoExtract pacman.conf option.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Bu … pplication may be of interest to you too. No idea about the passthrough though.

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mostlyharmless

Member

Registered: 2014-01-16

Posts: 72

Re: pacman NVIDIA driver options

Thanks, I looked at what you suggested.  Unfortunately, as far as I can make out after quite a bit of effort:

(1) it's non trivial to find what to list on NoExtract, and it's a global setting, so it would affect the nvidia driver, the vulkan driver, mesa etc. In addition, it'd be just as unsupported and more likely to lead to breakage than just using the NVIDIA installer instead of the arch pkg. 

(2) The activation issue in your link is interesting, but not the issue.  It's not activation, it's overwriting gl files that is the issue for the NVIDIA and cuda installers.

(3) Rather than --no-opengl-files, I suppose the best thing would be for the NVIDIA installer to check if there already are gl files before overwriting them, maybe then giving the user a choice about overwriting.  Similarly, the cuda driver *should* check if there's already nvidia-utils on the system, but I suppose that's not an Arch issue so much as NVIDIA's driver at fault.

Leaving this Unsolved in case anyone figures this out in the future.  Reinstalling the NVIDIA driver manually using the installer with major kernel upgrades isn't the end of the world I suppose.  In the meantime, everything works except for cuda, and I guess I stick with OpenCL (which works with both cards and the CPU) instead of CUDA.  Too bad, NVIDIA.