Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

ElKatrina · 2013-08-05 21:51:18

I just tried commenting out the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf, to upgrade to the 3.10 kernel and 319 driver, and it's still not working. I'm using the following at the moment:

linux 3.8.7-1
linux-firmware 20121118-1
nvidia 313.30-3
nvidia-libgl 313.30-2
nvidia-utils 313.30-2
opencl-nvidia 313.30-2

Not sure which of these I can safely upgrade, but I'm ignoring updates to them all at the moment.

If other folks want to pester nVidia, please feel free to. There is a `live chat' feature on their website, which I used as I indicated in my post in May, so if loads of people talk to a human at nVidia then maybe it will be escalated faster.

Does anybody use other distros? If anybody knows of people with similar issues on the forums of other distros, it would be interesting to see what they are doing about it

Last edited by ElKatrina (2013-08-07 02:52:27)

Gwenonkled · 2013-08-06 08:47:15

ElKatrina wrote:

I just tried commenting out the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf, to upgrade to the 3.10 kernel and 3.19 driver, and it's still not working. I'm using the following at the moment:
linux 3.8.7-1
linux-firmware 20121118-1
nvidia 313.30-3
nvidia-libgl 313.30-2
nvidia-utils 313.30-2
opencl-nvidia 313.30-2
Not sure which of these I can safely upgrade

You can upgrade linux-firmware the rest needs to stay at that version. But you could build an nvidia module for a 3.9.X kernel, too, if you like. Only linux 3.10 isn't compatible with nvidia 313.

oz · 2013-08-11 21:51:32

Still broken with latest 325.15 nVidia driver.

jsivak · 2013-08-13 13:12:09

ElKatrina wrote:

I just tried commenting out the IgnorePkg option in pacman.conf, to upgrade to the 3.10 kernel and 319 driver, and it's still not working. I'm using the following at the moment:
linux 3.8.7-1
linux-firmware 20121118-1
nvidia 313.30-3
nvidia-libgl 313.30-2
nvidia-utils 313.30-2
opencl-nvidia 313.30-2
Not sure which of these I can safely upgrade, but I'm ignoring updates to them all at the moment.
If other folks want to pester nVidia, please feel free to. There is a `live chat' feature on their website, which I used as I indicated in my post in May, so if loads of people talk to a human at nVidia then maybe it will be escalated faster.
Does anybody use other distros? If anybody knows of people with similar issues on the forums of other distros, it would be interesting to see what they are doing about it

I've got Xinerama working with linux 3.10.5 and nvidia 319.32-4. 325.15-1 broke my system as well, so I'm "staying put" on 319.32-4 for now.

oz · 2013-08-13 13:14:08

jsivak wrote:

I've got Xinerama working with linux 3.10.5 and nvidia 319.32-4. 325.15-1 broke my system as well, so I'm "staying put" on 319.32-4 for now.

Really? Can you post your Xorg.conf? I can't get 319 Xinerama to work on any kernel.

ElKatrina · 2013-08-17 00:56:12

I am adding this note to some sections of the wiki to advise people about this issue:

{{Warning|1=As of August 2013, Xinerama is broken when using the latest Linux kernel (3.10) and proprietary nVidia driver (325). See [https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=163319 this thread] for more information.}}

I have added the note to the Xinerama section of the Multihead page, and also to the multiple monitors section of the NVIDIA page. I will update these as the situation changes. I am fairly new to contributing to the wiki, so if somebody more experienced has any complaints about this feel free to change the notes

oz · 2013-08-17 00:58:50

The only thing I would note is that it's purely a nVidia driver issue as far as I can tell. The kernel has nothing to do with it other than the last working version of the nVidia driver (313) doesn't work on the latest 3.10 kernel.

Last edited by oz (2013-08-17 00:59:03)

ElKatrina · 2013-08-17 01:03:15

So in summary---313 is confirmed working without issue on 3.8 and 3.9, but not 3.10.

Later drivers (319, 325) are the ones that are causing the issue (unless jsivak has a solution for 319?).

Is that an accurate picture of the current situation?

oz · 2013-08-17 01:05:41

Yes that is correct.

Edit:
313 might work on the 3.10 kernel if it was possible to build it. The problem is that it won't build.

Last edited by oz (2013-08-17 01:06:26)

ElKatrina · 2013-08-17 01:07:43

Fine, changing to

{{Warning|1=As of August 2013, Xinerama is broken when using the proprietary NVIDIA driver from 319 upwards. Users wishing to use Xinerama with the NVIDIA driver should use the NVIDIA 313 driver, which works only with Linux kernels earlier than 3.10. See [https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=163319 this thread] for more information.}}

tdcrone · 2013-08-19 14:06:33

To answer ElKatrina, I am having the same issue on Fedora Core 19. I have been following the thread for a while but didn't have anything to contribute; at the time I first ran into the issue, there were no other reports of this problem that I could find.

I am on kernel 3.10 but had the same issues with 3.9. Nvidia driver is currently self-reporting 319.32. Thanks to Fedora's update system it is painful to downgrade, so I haven't. As a temporary solution I am running TwinView with Gnome on my two "left" monitors :.0, then run VMWare full-screen on :.1.

Every time I pull another RH update I try to set it up properly but...

ElKatrina · 2013-08-21 09:58:23

Thanks for this, tdcrone. I did have a look on the Fedora Project website, amongst other distros, but I found the wiki and documentation to be a bit confusing and unhelpful (I love ArchWiki)

Anyway I know that Fedora developers have a lot of clout with hardware vendors, probably more so than any other distro, so I would be interested to know if they know about this issue. When I get some free time, I might ask about on Fedora and other mailing lists and see if the devs have an action plan. (I am currently writing my Masters thesis and won't have time for this for about a month, though).

If anybody wants to talk to other distros, here are some numbers:

Edit:
I went around looking at the driver + kernel versions of other distros, since Arch is bleeding edge and other distros probably haven't encountered this problem yet as they are using old drivers. Here are things that I have found:

Debian's stable release (Wheezy) is using the 304 drivers. You can see their progress on working on the nVidia driver here. It looks like they are currently testing 313, 319 and 325. Maybe somebody should give those devs a heads up? However, it seems that Debian is not going to migrate to the 3.9 kernel until two releases after the current stable release, so it may not be a big priority for them, especially given Debian's dislike of non-free software.

Fedora: this is so confusing. I can't even find an nvidia package in their package manager. But thanks to tdcrone for the heads up! We know that this is already an issue for Fedora users, so the devs might like to know about it.

Ubuntu: They have a release called `saucy salamander' which is coming in October. This will be using the 3.8 kernel, and I'm not sure that 319 builds on that kernel, so I don't think they will have this issue. I can't see any releases after that, so I'm not sure if there are devs who would care about this issue just yet.

Again, if anybody using a different distro has further information, please share. Arch has a relatively small number of users, so it would be interesting to see when one of the `bigger' distros updates to the later nVidia drivers.

Last edited by ElKatrina (2013-08-21 10:33:32)

tdcrone · 2013-08-21 13:53:15

BTW there is a Fedora bug already,
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=981686

I will update it with my information and observations, as well as a link here if that's okay.

Thanks!
-Tim

ElKatrina · 2013-08-22 10:59:59

Yes, please feel free to link here. However, it does seem to be something that only nvidia can fix, given that the driver is closed-source... the bug on Arch has already been closed for this reason.

I will follow the bug report on Fedora with interest, cheers.

oz · 2013-09-09 00:35:10

After running for weeks now with only half my monitors I finally got fed up and found a temporary workaround. It seems that when the 3.9/10 kernel first came out none of the nVidia drivers would compile so some people created patches. The patches are for the 319 nVidia but they will apply successfully to 313.

So with this patch (from here) you can compile the 313 driver on an up-to-date Arch system. Follow steps sort of like this:

# ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.30.run -x
# cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.30
# patch -p1 < pastie-7942599.diff
# ./nvidia-installer

Do not install the 32-bit compatibility stuff because it will overwrite a few of the 64-bit files and break everything. You may also have to look in /usr/lib (/usr/lib64) and check the nvidia symlinks to make sure none are pointing to the 325 driver (or whatever version you had before).

Seems to be working and functional so far. My Arch system is otherwise fully up to date with kernel 3.10.10-1.

Last edited by oz (2013-09-09 00:38:30)

ElKatrina · 2013-09-12 21:57:21

Thanks for this. I got totally sick of this nonsense, so I switched to ATI (using the OS driver). I have a bunch of ATI cards that I was meaning to use, and this pushed me over the edge.

It's so nice to be rid of Xinerama! RandR is the way life should work. I only have 3 of my 5 monitors working at the moment, but will fix soon.

Good luck with this everybody, I will follow with interest, but I'm bailing out on nvidia for the time being. This is the typical scenario of why free/OS software is better. *gets off soapbox*

Edit: maybe if I get ATI working precisely the way I want it, I'll donate my old nvidia cards to the nouveau folks so that they have some hardware to play with. Maybe it'll help them get multi{head,gpu} support sometime.

Last edited by ElKatrina (2013-09-12 21:58:44)

jsivak · 2013-09-14 16:45:42

oz wrote:

jsivak wrote:
I've got Xinerama working with linux 3.10.5 and nvidia 319.32-4. 325.15-1 broke my system as well, so I'm "staying put" on 319.32-4 for now.
Really? Can you post your Xorg.conf? I can't get 319 Xinerama to work on any kernel.

Sorry for the extremely late reply.. when I upgraded to a 3.10.7 kernel awhile back the nvidia 319 driver stopped working as well.. I screwed around with it for about a day and then called it quits with Xinerama and went with a hardware based solution (bought a Matrox TripleHead2Go box).

Went from 4 monitors to 3, but its still better than twinview or separate X screens running.

Last edited by jsivak (2013-09-14 16:46:41)

jarshvor · 2013-10-05 17:02:30

Just to ask about the latest state of affairs in this thread;

Is anybody still pushing-for/expecting a fix to Xinerama.

Im wondering if anyone managed to get any attention from Nvidia or not, so as to try and talk to someone there.

oz · 2013-10-05 20:07:04

I haven't heard anything. I just now submitted an issue to nVidia's Driver Feedback system. I honestly don't know what the best method is to submit bugs like this. There have been driver releases since this first appeared so it would seem they are unaware of the problem or ???

jarshvor · 2013-10-05 22:10:33

I'v been trying to reach developers on IRC and tried using the live chat thingy on the nvidia site, but it didnt work for me.

oz · 2013-10-25 19:45:47

After some weeks no response whatsoever from nVidia for me either.

landypro · 2013-11-13 01:04:39

I'm just wondering if anyone has tried using the nvidia-beta (331.20-1) drivers from the AUR?

Gwenonkled · 2013-11-14 15:27:52

Once more the problem persists. I just installed the nvidia-full-beta driver bundle from the AUR and it didn't help.
So I went back to my beloved version 313.30

oz · 2013-12-18 21:40:43

landypro wrote:

I'm just wondering if anyone has tried using the nvidia-beta (331.20-1) drivers from the AUR?

I just tried with the official 331.20 release and it's still broken.

Still no word or response from nVidia whatsoever.

pan-bolek · 2013-12-21 04:19:26

I don't know if this will help or not, but I am running openSuSE 12.3 x86-64 & have 331.20 running with kernel 3.7.10-1.1

I have three displays on 2 NVIDIA GPU GeForce GT 610

No problem with spreading everything across all three displays - BUT

when I get thrown into the screensaver, each monitor has it's only screensaver session.

Previously when I ran openSuSE 12.1 with 310.32, everything ran perfectly.

If you need more info, please tell me what you need to know and I will provide it.

I'd really like to get the screensavers re-synched again. However, it is like watching an old slot machine - wondering if it will come all cherries (best to date has been two...)

pan-bolek

Linux machine.local 3.7.10-1.1-desktop #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Feb 28 15:06:29 UTC 2013 (82d3f21) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Arch Linux

#26 2013-08-05 21:51:18

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

#27 2013-08-06 08:47:15

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

#28 2013-08-11 21:51:32

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

#29 2013-08-13 13:12:09

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#30 2013-08-13 13:14:08

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#31 2013-08-17 00:56:12

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#32 2013-08-17 00:58:50

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#33 2013-08-17 01:03:15

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#34 2013-08-17 01:05:41

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#35 2013-08-17 01:07:43

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#36 2013-08-19 14:06:33

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#37 2013-08-21 09:58:23

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#38 2013-08-21 13:53:15

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#39 2013-08-22 10:59:59

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#40 2013-09-09 00:35:10

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#41 2013-09-12 21:57:21

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#42 2013-09-14 16:45:42

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#43 2013-10-05 17:02:30

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#44 2013-10-05 20:07:04

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#45 2013-10-05 22:10:33

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#46 2013-10-25 19:45:47

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

#47 2013-11-13 01:04:39

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

#48 2013-11-14 15:27:52

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

#49 2013-12-18 21:40:43

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

#50 2013-12-21 04:19:26

Re: Xinerama seems to be broken with latest updates

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