R SIG Fedora - Jan 2016 - rgl.snapshot only captures a small portion what's visible in the RGL device window on CentOS 7

Tom,
> Okay. I do "official" package builds of R for RHEL/CentOS as part
of the EPEL repository:
> https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL
> If its not painful for you to do so, testing my packages vs yours just to
rule out misconfiguration in R would be
> helpful. I don't think this is likely, but I'm being thorough.
I've now tried the EPEL version of R and it still has the problem.
> Okay. Nouveau is _not_ the NVIDIA driver, that's the open source driver
provided by the Linux kernel.
> It is possible this is a bug in nouveau.
> You may want to try to install the NVIDIA driver and see if it resolves
your issue:
> http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html
I started trying to do this, but I'm stuck.
I started with
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/340.96/README/installdriver.html
, which led me to
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/340.96/README/commonproblems.html#nouveau
. I created /etc/modprobe.d/disable-nouveau.conf as instructed then rebooted,
but the nvidia installer found the nouveau driver running anyway, so it wrote
two more .conf files (one in /usr/lib/modproe.d and the other in
/etc/modeprobe.d) and then halted. I rebooted and tried the installer again, but
again it noticed the nouveau driver running.
I suspect this is because the initial ramdisk image contains Nouveau because,
even though I've done systemctl set-default multi-user.target, during boot I
still see something that looks like a graphical screen display for a while
before it drops back to a text mode to display the login prompt.
So, following the instructions, I tried to rebuild the initial ramdisk image.
The nvidia documentation does not say how to do that, so I Googled and found
https://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/CreateNewInitrd , which unfortunately
gives instructions only for CentOS 5 and CentOS 6, but not CentOS 7. I'm
afraid to do the wrong thing, so I'm stuck.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Thanks.

-Ben




The information in this e-mail is intended only for the ...{{dropped:11}}

On 01/11/2016 03:52 PM, Wittner, Ben, Ph.D. wrote:
> I started trying to do this, but I'm stuck.
> I started with
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/340.96/README/installdriver.html
, which led me to
http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/340.96/README/commonproblems.html#nouveau
. I created /etc/modprobe.d/disable-nouveau.conf as instructed then rebooted,
but the nvidia installer found the nouveau driver running anyway, so it wrote
two more .conf files (one in /usr/lib/modproe.d and the other in
/etc/modeprobe.d) and then halted. I rebooted and tried the installer again, but
again it noticed the nouveau driver running.
> I suspect this is because the initial ramdisk image contains Nouveau
because, even though I've done systemctl set-default multi-user.target,
during boot I still see something that looks like a graphical screen display for
a while before it drops back to a text mode to display the login prompt.
> So, following the instructions, I tried to rebuild the initial ramdisk
image. The nvidia documentation does not say how to do that, so I Googled and
found https://wiki.centos.org/TipsAndTricks/CreateNewInitrd , which
unfortunately gives instructions only for CentOS 5 and CentOS 6, but not CentOS
7. I'm afraid to do the wrong thing, so I'm stuck.
> Any suggestions would be appreciated.
> \
I have not tried it personally, but these instructions seem correct:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/centos-7-nvidia.html

Basically, edit the grub2 cmdline to include the extra option:

  rdblacklist=nouveau

hth,

~tom

=Red Hat

Tom,

Bingo!

I followed the instructions in the link below, which allowed me to install the
nvidia driver, which fixed the original problem with rgl.snapshot.

Thanks very much for all your help.

I guess I'll file a bug in the CentOS Bug Tracker so that the nouveau driver
might get fixed. I'll also post to R-help so someone with the same problem
who only searches R-help and not this SIG will see the solution.

-Ben

-----Original Message-----
From: Tom Callaway [mailto:tcallawa at redhat.com] 
Sent: Monday, January 11, 2016 4:10 PM
To: Wittner, Ben, Ph.D.; r-sig-fedora at r-project.org
Cc: Duncan Murdoch
Subject: Re: [R-sig-Fedora] rgl.snapshot only captures a small portion
what's visible in the RGL device window on CentOS 7

I have not tried it personally, but these instructions seem correct:

http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/centos-7-nvidia.html

Basically, edit the grub2 cmdline to include the extra option:

  rdblacklist=nouveau

hth,

~tom

=Red Hat


The information in this e-mail is intended only for the ...{{dropped:11}}