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#1 2012-01-21 09:46:10

MkFly
Member
From: Mars
Registered: 2009-12-10
Posts: 141

[SOLVEDish] 'nvidia' module blacklisting not working with kmod

I have a ThinkPad T420 with Sandy Bridge and NVIDIA graphics, using Bumblebee (with power management) and bbswitch.  Normally, the only time the nvidia module is loaded or the NVIDIA card is on is when I run something with 'optirun [command],' then it removes the module and powers the card down on exit.

I noticed that google-chrome (tried extra/chromium and aur/google-chrome-dev) loads the nvidia module when it starts, even if I start it without optirun!  This also powers on the card.  Chrome doesn't utilize the card during that session (I checked performance on some WebGL demos), and more importantly, it doesn't disable the card or unload the module when Chrome exits.

I tried this with Bumblebee stopped as well, same result.  I had blacklisted the nvidia module in modprobe.conf, which (up until upgrading to kmod this evening), worked in that it kept Chrome from loading the module, but Bumblebee/optirun could stlil load it when needed.

Now with kmod 4-1, that no longer seems to work ... Chrome is back at it, loading the module when its not needed.  And yes, I did rename modprobe.conf.pacsave back to modprobe.conf


Any ideas?  I want only Bumblebee to be able to load the module / enable the card ...

Last edited by MkFly (2012-01-22 06:36:21)

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#2 2012-01-22 04:39:08

MkFly
Member
From: Mars
Registered: 2009-12-10
Posts: 141

Re: [SOLVEDish] 'nvidia' module blacklisting not working with kmod

I managed to trace this problem to libvdpau -- apparently Flash player uses this, so it tries to load the nVIDIA driver.  If I remove /usr/lib/vdpau/libvdpau_nvidia.so (from nvidia-utils-bumblebee), the NVIDIA driver no longer loads by itself, and Bumblebee still works ...

I now see this message when starting Chrome:

Failed to open VDPAU backend libvdpau_nvidia.so

But question: what problems will this cause?  I assume that VDPAU is now unavailable completely?  Any way around this?

Last edited by MkFly (2012-01-22 06:30:44)

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#3 2012-01-22 06:36:08

MkFly
Member
From: Mars
Registered: 2009-12-10
Posts: 141

Re: [SOLVEDish] 'nvidia' module blacklisting not working with kmod

I found a somewhat better solution to this (in that it doesn't involve removing files).  This is from the NVIDIA driver README (emphasis mine):

http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/L … pport.html

NVIDIA README wrote:

The VDPAU wrapper library is responsible for determining which vendor-specific driver to load for a given X11 display/screen. At present, it hard-codes "nvidia" as the driver. The environment variable VDPAU_DRIVER may be set to override this default. The actual library loaded will be libvdpau_${VDPAU_DRIVER}.so.

If I set VDPAU_DRIVER to 'intel' for example (which doesn't exist), it fails in the same way, but without me having to remove libvdpau_nvidia.so.

As such, I'm marking this as [SOLVEDish] for now.  I'd like to be able to use VDPAU when running programs via optirun (that is, via the NVIDIA card), but otherwise, I don't want the module to be loaded.  I might see if I can hack that up, but for now this works.

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#4 2012-01-22 08:07:38

gavinhungry
Member
Registered: 2011-02-13
Posts: 9
Website

Re: [SOLVEDish] 'nvidia' module blacklisting not working with kmod

https://github.com/gavinhungry/patches/ … iver.patch

Last edited by gavinhungry (2014-11-19 18:44:28)

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