NVidia in da house (er, new server)!

So I've been on a quest to get a modern PCI Express card working in my new Dell SC1430. With this goal in mind, I had ordered a PCI Express 8x to 16x Adapter like this one off of eBay:
http://www.orbitmicro.com/global/pciexpressx8tox16adapter-p-755.html

The SC1430 has 8x connectors (running 4x speed PCI Express). In the hopes that it would work in the box, I bought a BFG Geforce 8500 GT PCI Express 256MB card from BestBuy. I checked and it is cheaper on Amazon.

Here's a good article from Tom's Hardware on PCI Express scaling:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/27/pci_express_scaling_analysis/

I figured that even if the card didn't work, I'd use it later in the next box I build. Now, I understood that the adapter would raise the card in the slot. The Dell has a hinged metal door that holds all the expansion cards in place, but I noticed that that little door can be left open while the case is closed. This would allow me to use the card for a while until I had the chance to machine a new bracket for the card.

Last night, I attached the adapter to the new BFG card (with a satisfying "click", no less) and put it in the first PCI Express slot (SLOT1_PCIE) of the Dell. I left the hinged door open, but was able to close the case. I hooked up my FP1901 to the digital output and my FP1907 to the analog output. I can tell you I was quite surprised when I started the server and the FP1901 that was connected to the digital output came to life!

I booted into runlevel 3 (nongraphical, multiuser mode) in Fedora and grabbed the latest NVidia driver installer for my 64-bit OS via lynx. I ran the installer. There was not a default kernel module for my particular kernel, so the installer created one and then asked if I wanted to create a new xorg.conf for the X Windows. I said yes and the installer finished. I was elated to see X startup with the NVidia splash screen! I soon had Twin View setup and GLXgears gave me 6200FPS! Unlike the ATI card I had running in the box previously, mplayer and xine ran my HDV videos like champs! Hoohah! Cinelerra runs well, but I've decided to not compile OpenGL just yet, as it did cause some instability on my previous box.

I tell you, NVidia drivers are an absolute joy to setup and use. As I've reiterated many times on this blog, most recently here:
/2007/10/year-later-ati-linux-drivers-still-suck.html

ATIs Linux drivers are riddled with bugs; hence, I returned the ATI card, a VisionTek x1550, to the store.

In sum, the BFG Geforce 8500 GT PCI Express 256MB card works in the Dell with a PCI Express 8x to 16x adapter card. If you use a PCI Express adapter, be aware that the card will be raised in the slot when it is seated.

the mule

ps - Now I just have to debug and fix a nagging audio noise with Fedora and the Dell and I will be one happy dude.

A year later, ATI Linux drivers still suck

Folks, just in case you don't know, ATI's display drivers for Linux still suck, one year later:
/2006/09/ati-opengl-20-implementation.html
/2006/09/opengl-acceleration-for-cinelerra-not.html

Here's a bit of the latest pain:
https://init.linpro.no/pipermail/skolelinux.no/cinelerra/2007-October/012026.html

Here's another tale of woe (read starting with post #1014):
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=155503&page=102&pp=10

In the interest of having a clean system to start with, I reinstalled Fedora Core 6, 64-bit. I installed all Cinelerra source dependencies and attendent media players and apps as per this post (/2007/09/building-cinelerra-on-fc6-64-bit.html). I then made the very intelligent choice of backing up my system by using a Knoppix Bootable CD (www.knoppix.com) to load partimage and make an image of my system drive. For those who'd like to know how to do this, I will try to post a doc on what to do.
Update 2008/11/16
Here's how you can do this.
end update

This allows me to easily restore from image if anything went drastically wrong with the ATI install process. It is a good thing I did this.

After having the core softwares installed, I compiled Cinelerra and created a project by recording a screen capture with voiceover, some fades and a simple mask. This worked well, so I then decided to tackle building the 8.36.5 version of the ATI installer. I built the ATI rpms with the following command:
./ati-driver-installer-8.36.5-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg Fedora/FC6
With the recent clean install of FC6 x86-64-bit, I was surprised to see that the build process actually worked! Previously, this build process failed. I speculate that the reason for the previous failure was that I kept my repositories consistent on this OS build. This means I tried not to mix rpm bases from more than two non-Fedora repositories: Dries and Livna, respectively. Refer to http://crazedmuleproductions.blogspot.com/2007/09/building-cinelerra-on-fc6-64-bit.html) for the detail. So having this build process work was unexpected. It gave me hope that I might have some resolution to my ATI woes.

I installed the created ATI rpms and shutdown the box. I popped in the VisionTek card and rebooted to init 3, full multi-user mode, without X enabled. I then ran the ATI configurator:
./aticonfig --initial -f

[sodo@ogre 8.36]# ls -l
total 65244
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 53331877 Oct 8 21:18 ati-driver-installer-8.36.5-x86.x86_64.run
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 6469324 Oct 10 22:49 ATI-fglrx-8.36.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3367465 Oct 10 22:49 ATI-fglrx-control-center-8.36.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 45017 Oct 10 22:49 ATI-fglrx-devel-8.36.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 3192548 Oct 10 22:49 ATI-fglrx-IA32-libs-8.36.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 309737 Oct 10 22:49 kernel-module-ATI-fglrx-2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-8.36.5-1.fc6.x86_64.rpm


This created a default fglrx /etc/X11/xorg.conf file. I started X and was pleasantly surprised to see both my monitors (Dell FP1901 and FP1907) come alive. I started the ATI Catalyst Display utility and was excited to see that OpenGL was indeed active. I switched from Clone mode (2 separate screens displaying the same thing) to Big Desktop mode, one large desktop. Excitedly, I wanted to see the behavior of xine and mplayer under 8.36.5, as I read some threads that lead me to believe I might get OpenGL without the xine crashes and mplayer sluggishness I had seen using 8.39.4 and 8.40.4. Unfortunately, it was not to be, as I loaded mplayer to see the same sluggishness on HDV content display. I then started xine and true to form, xine displayed the HDV content, but then promptly crashed X.

Ah well. At this point, I decided to restart the system, just to see if the restart improved conditions. When I restarted, I got the following error:
/etc/rc.d/rc.sysinit line 819: Segmentation fault

Oh boy. That does not look good. And the entire system has locked up..I can't even reboot. After a hard shutdown, I restarted, only to find the same error condition reappear. Google is again my best friend:
http://www.linuxforums.org/forum/servers/15670-help-segmentation-fault.html

So, it seems my choices are that:
1) my system memory is corrupt
2) grep is corrupt
3) I've been hacked

This is a new server with ECC memory, so I really doubt the memory has gone bad. But I'd rather be sure. Through the above Google find, I see that memtest86 (www.memtest86.com) is a solid program for testing your system memory that I haven't used before. The doc on the website is very good. I grabbed the ISO online and burned a copy to CD and let my machine churn for about three hours running through memory tests. Thank goodness, no memory errors were found. It seems that Mr. Brady knows his stuff! Thanks Chris!

Secondly, I tried to remark out the offending "for" loop within rc.sysinit. I needed to boot off a Knoppix (www.knoppix.com) CD to be able to assemble my software RAID partition, mount it and edit the file. Doing this and rebooting yielded the same results.

My third and final troubleshooting procedure was to remove and replace "grep" which is where the init loader failed. Again, I booted off the Knoppix CD, assembled and mounted my RAID. This time, however, I changed my root (chroot) partition in order the remove and reinstall grep via rpm and the Fedora install DVD. I did this, rebooted and received the same error.

At this point, I threw my hands up in the air and decided to reinstall my clean partimage image. Knoppix to the rescue again, and I restored the image of my clean install off a second drive I had on the system. A reboot later and I was back up and running. Praise the Lord!

So..what is the moral of this story, you might ask? It must be this, cause I can't think of anything else right now: Don't trust people over 30 and be sure that ATI will always disappoint you if you run Linux.

Harumph!
The Mule

ATI OpenGL 2.0 implementation incomplete..hello NVidia!

Sad to say, but all you ATI lovers (like I USED to be) are in for a rude surprise with ATIs' "OpenGL2.0" Linux driver implementation. After 1 1/2 days of finally getting my ATI All in Wonder 9800 Pro to actually use Direct Rendering and OpenGL2.0 and see it working well (5000FPS on glxgears), it was very disheartening to find out that ATI had not provided the proper 2.0 hooks for Cinelerra to use. Specifically, programming hooks like glDeleteShader were not implemented. The troubleshooting was quite informative, as I am not an active C programmer.

The solution was typical of today's PC market. If it don't work, buy one that does! So I went to B&H Photo and bought a BFG nVidia GeForce 7600GS, 512MB. Twenty minutes after getting home, the card was in the box, drivers were compiled, installed and working. Fifteen minutes after that, Cinelerra was compiled and I was using OpenGL2.0! Yeehoo!! And at twice the playback speed of what I was getting previously with the ATI card. I will report back on the performance of this card once I actually USE it.

optimal drive/partition setup for Cinelerra

To keep it simple, I would use five drives and do four logical partitions. This would allow for all filesystems to be on separate drive spindles:
- one system drive for /root, /usr, etc - ext3
- one storage drive for source files - ext3
- one working drive for index files in .bcast - ext2
- two working drives in RAID0 (stripe set) for destination render - ext2

If you only have four drives, just keep the source files on the system drive. I would think the index files would be the most used/most reads. I have to test this use "iostat -x " to monitor read/write stats of each physical device. I assume the render partition would be the heaviest hit, so make that your RAID stripe. You can do software RAID, but as a person who runs a decent sized HP web server farm, we've always depended on hardware RAID because CPU cycles are offloaded to the RAID card itself, rather than the operating system using CPU cycles for software RAID. Since rendering is pretty much all CPU, except for the input/index file reads and the destination render file writes, it makes sense that software RAID would tend to slow your rendering down.

Finally, ext2 is very important..no journaling necessary for the working drives..just storage.

When I used Adobe Premiere, I noticed that my ATI All In Wonder actually sped up the MPEG2 render times by 50%. However, I haven't been able to get the fglrx driver to work w/my dual monitor setup on FC4. Fglrx works with one monitor, but dammit, there's no way I'm going back to just one monitor! But I will need to test out whether or not the fglrx driver speeds rendering for Cinelerra as it does Premiere.