Webconverger with nvidia acceleration

[Kai Hendry]

Hi guys especially those with nvidia hardware.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hendry/7202592208/

I've prepared a build with nvidia acceleration via their "unified"
295.40 driver:
http://build.webconverger.org/webc-0d80e4c.iso

The "unified" 295.40 driver unfortunately doesn't have support for
"legacy" nvidia hardware. In this case, with some luck, Xorg will
default to the nouveau driver. I would be ideal if someone could
confirm their old legacy nvidia hardware does indeed correctly fall
back to the nouveau driver, because I can't test this.

It's not reasonable for me to support proprietary acceleration on
"legacy" nvidia cards since:
A) I don't have any such hardware to develop with
B) New Xorg 1.12 have a new API I've been told, which the legacy
drivers will not be ported to

You can tell if your nvidia is considered a legacy device by looking
up the ids on:
https://github.com/Webconverger/webc/tree/master/usr/share/nvidia

The magic detection stuff happens in
https://github.com/Webconverger/webc/blob/master/etc/webc/startx.sh
because nvidia-xconfig is unfortunately very stupid. I might make this
look easy but many man hours and logistics went into this, so I hope
you will appreciate this and support the company via a subscription. I
must also credit Andreas Beckmann since his and other Debian
contributors helped me a lot with
http://anonscm.debian.org/viewvc/pkg-nvidia/packages/nvidia-graphics-drivers/trunk/debian/

I have noticed Adobe Flash being a little more unstable on my nvidia
hardware, by going full screen and back in Youtube. Webconverger does
recover usually pretty well, but it's a concern.

Enjoy!

[ahma...@gmail.com]

Hi Kai,

I tested this build on a Zotac ZBOXHD-ID40 which has an NVIDIA Ion graphic card.  I was on youtube watching some videos and the flash plugin crashed a couple times and found that the color for videos is off.  Colors are fine for everything else just when I play a video on youtube either with flash or their html5 player the colors are off.  Anyone else experience this?  I did a test with with two computers with a video test pattern on youtube and it looks like the red and blue channels are reversed?  On the build provided the last two bars are blue then red but on my home pc it is red then blue?  I tried some videos on vimeo and the colors look right.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqdCFult7MA 

Anyone else replicate this?

Arian

[Kai Hendry]

Thanks for this. I will be working solidly on this the next few days.
I aim to upgrade the nvidia driver to 295.49 and there I will play
about with Flash versions, and see if their stability varies. If
someone gets there before me, it would be awesome to work together on
this. :)

Will check for colours too.

Kind regards,

[Maleki]

Hi Kai,

Well I gave it a shot but I am sure I am missing something. I
followed the chroot instructions here http://webconverger.org/chroot/
and was able to setup an environment to build webconverger. Once that
was setup I chroot to "<builddir>/sid-root/root/webconverger/chroot"
and downloaded the NVIDIA-Linux-x86-295.53.run. I found the old
install log @ /var/log/nvidia-installer.log which documented your
295.40 install. It says you used ./nvidia-installer -a -z --no-x-
check --no-kernel-module -e to install so after extracting "sh NVIDIA-
Linux-x86-295.53.run --extract-only" I used that command to install
and followed the prompts using the answers you used to install 295.40
but it fails on depmod -aq which said it couldn't find my /lib/modules/
2.6<blah>/modules.dep. I ran depmod 3.2.0-2artaxl-486 -aq and that
seemed to work but after building it and running it the boot logs show
it loaded the 295.40 kernel module and never loads xwindows. Let me
know if I am in the right direction and provide some guidance more
then happy to give it a shot.

Also after doing a make and generating an iso it is 977MB? Should the
iso be that large?

Arian

[Kai Hendry]

Hi Arian,

Sounds like you made a good start, but were missing the matching
kernel module. I've used
https://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBUILD?h=packages/nvidia
as a guide to build this. I will write this up webconverger.org/nvidia
how I do this in the future, step by step.

I can confirm the colour bug: http://flic.kr/p/c2QjZQ

After investigating it seems the same as
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668512 which might be
addressed by a wrapper
http://lists.freedesktop.org/archives/vdpau/2012-May/000022.html Looks
a little tricky to integrate.

There is also some talk about SSE2 assumption made by Adobe which adds
to the instability IIUC.

I think the finger pointing is directed at Adobe here. Either way this
is a serious PITA. :/

[Maleki]

Hi Kai,

Thanks for the tips. A step by step on the kernel module would be
great. I think I have a workaround for the color issue. After
searching around found a workaround if you add

/etc/adobe/mms.cfg
#Hardware video decoding
EnableLinuxHWVideoDecode=1
OverrideGPUValidation=true

Color now render correctly. But I still have stability issues. If I
go fullscreen and back a couple times the flash player locks up. Same
message board recommends adding "export VDPAU_NVIDIA_NO_OVERLAY=1" I
tried this but it still hangs on occasion.

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=137877&p=5

Arian

On May 21, 4:52 am, Kai Hendry <hen...@webconverger.com> wrote:
> Hi Arian,
>
> Sounds like you made a good start, but were missing the matching

> kernel module. I've usedhttps://projects.archlinux.org/svntogit/packages.git/tree/trunk/PKGBU...

> as a guide to build this. I will write this up webconverger.org/nvidia
> how I do this in the future, step by step.
>
> I can confirm the colour bug:http://flic.kr/p/c2QjZQ
>

> After investigating it seems the same ashttp://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=668512which might be

[Kai Hendry]

Thanks again Arian for looking into this. Your hints helped gather
information to do a monster commit:
https://github.com/Webconverger/webc/commit/9eba0e05b1dc900a90b997ae4a25e68f5f02f499

I should have split these commits tbh between the nvidia update, the
flash update and the libvdpau integration.

I also added the wiki page on updating nvidia:
http://webconverger.org/nvidia/


Right now everything works and is more stable than before on my nvidia hardware.
http://build.webconverger.org/webc-aea81c1.iso

Really need now to line up for a release before the end of the week,

[Maleki]

Hi Kai,

I performed a round of testing and no more smurfs. :)  Tested with Youtube and Vimeo and videos play fine.  Only issue I found on youtube is when you resize the video it sometimes hangs.  I am running an Atom D525 1.8GHz with Nvidia Ion w/ 2GB ram which might not have enough resources to resize.  Can you try to replicate this?  If you can't may I ask what hardware your running?

As for overall browsing, the system is very smooth excellent work.    

      
Arian

[Kai Hendry]

On 23 May 2012 14:36, Maleki <ahma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> resize the video it sometimes hangs.  I am running an Atom D525 1.8GHz with
> Nvidia Ion w/ 2GB ram which might not have enough resources to resize.  Can

When it hangs, does it recover after a period of time?

> you try to replicate this?  If you can't may I ask what hardware your
> running?

http://natalian.org/archives/2009/09/06/linux_i7_rig/

> As for overall browsing, the system is very smooth excellent work.

Thanks, I'm very excited to release this piece of work. I think this
justifies a major release.


Kind regards,

[Maleki]

When it hangs, does it recover after a period of time?

Yes it does.  It throws the standard flash plugin died image and gives you the option to reload.

[Kai Hendry]

On 24 May 2012 00:11, Maleki <ahma...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Yes it does.  It throws the standard flash plugin died image and gives you
> the option to reload.

And does it crash immediately again or is it a bit intermittent?

I think I want to push ahead for a long delayed release for Friday nonetheless.


Kind regards,

[Maleki]

And does it crash immediately again or is it a bit intermittent?

It is intermittent only when you try to resize the video to full screen and back. 

Arian 

On Wednesday, May 23, 2012 10:08:33 AM UTC-7, Kai Hendry wrote:

> Yes it does.  It throws the standard flash plugin died image and gives you
> the option to reload.

And does it crash immediately again or is it a bit intermittent?

I think I want to push ahead for a long delayed release for Friday nonetheless.


Kind regards,