# Is anyone running nvidia proprietary under Xen Dom0?

## koan

Hello,

I am considering rebuilding my Xen dom0 under Gentoo once again, currently it is debian (was opensuse, was gentoo).  The main reason for this is I want to be able to run nvidia proprietary drivers on dom0.

The drivers give page faults under debian, where they worked fine under opensuse.

It would also be good to get back to the flexibility of gentoo.. I only really switched to opensuse because xen support was waning in gentoo a few years ago.  The latest Opensuse install oops on my hardware, hence the switch to debian which doesn't like nvidia under dom0.  Ultimately, this all comes down to kernels, and so I am back looking at gentoo.

nvidia under dom0 has always been a bit tricky as it is unsupported, but I have been through a few kernel iterations with opensuse and had it working.

If anyone here is using dom0 with nvidia proprietary, could you let me know your combination of kernel, nvidia and xen versions that you have had success with?

Cheers,

Paul

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## Princess Nell

You mean, running the nvidia drivers on a xen kernel? If my understanding is correct, this is simply a matter of procedure, not particular software versions.

I haven't done this on gentoo, only on CentOS, and a web search for e.g. "centos nvidia xen kernel" should yield any number of usable links, like this one http://legroom.net/2008/06/22/running-binary-nvidia-drivers-under-xen-host.

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## koan

Unfortunately, this isn't the case any more.

Changes in 2.6.32 mean that the procedure below doesn't work. I am hoping that later kernels will have different results.

Hopefully, kernel 3.0 will no longer have this issue at all, if the code paths for Xen and not-Xen are the same.

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## s4e8

Newer kernel support KMS and paravirt layer, both labeled as GPL.

Nvidia don't open anything, so It can't support anything KMS and paravirt.

But Xen dom0 entered the mainline kernel and forced below paravirt layer.

So you must choose one between XEN and nvidia display card.

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## Mad Merlin

It may not be an option if you already have a large investment in Xen already, but KVM works beautifully with the nvidia blob, no fiddling required.

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## koan

 *s4e8 wrote:*   

> Newer kernel support KMS and paravirt layer, both labeled as GPL.
> 
> Nvidia don't open anything, so It can't support anything KMS and paravirt.
> 
> But Xen dom0 entered the mainline kernel and forced below paravirt layer.
> ...

 

I am not sure what you are referring to here, but clearly there are some kernels that do work, and some that don't.  My question was which? Dom0 is mainline only from 3.0 onwards.

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## Knaprigt

I know this topic is kind of old, but I though I'd hijack it for a while.

Thing is I just decided to try out Xen and go for a Gentoo dom0 with Xorg and proprietary nvidia drivers, while having a domU running Windows 7.

I'm new to Xen but I've been able to install the nvidia drivers under the dom0 using the environment variable IGNORE_XEN_PRESENCE=1. The system boots and I can start Xorg without any problems, however changing from Xorg to a console (e.g. <Ctrl>+<Alt>+<F1>) results in the monitor reporting "no signal", I can however change back to Xorg (<Ctrl>+<Alt>+<F7>) and all is fine. Same thing happens if I quit Xorg. In other words it seems the nvidia driver doesn't properly "lets go" of the hardware when Xorg is dropped.

Just wonder if anyone else has experienced this problem, and if so, knows how to fix it?

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## Knaprigt

Never mind my previous post. Got the problem sorted by following the instructions in this post:

http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2435805&postcount=114

Strangely enough it doesn't seem to work with all nvidia cards, but if someone else runs into the same problem it may be worth a shot!

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