Hi,
I just had the weirdest of system crashed. Here goes.
I wanted to install a desktop step by step, as I usually do. First the base system, then the X Window System, then the WindowMaker window manager. Everything went OK, then I installed kmod-nvidia from ELRepo. Yum informed me that the driver conflicted with x11-glamor (something like that), so I removed the corresponding package.
While doing all this, the system still defaulted to boot in console mode (meaning multi-user.target and not graphical.target). To test X, I just launched WindowMaker using startx.
Anyway, I rebooted, and then... nothing. System refused even to startup, and systemd suggested to me that I open journalctl (which taught me nothing).
Right now I've started a Slax LiveCD to backup all my data and reinstall the whole thing from scratch. I don't have the slightest clue as to what could possibly have happened here. The only thing I wonder: could it be that installing the kmod-nvidia driver while booting to a default console (and not graphical) could lead to this weirdness? A previous installation on that machine went OK, but the difference was that the first time, I started with a full GNOME installation right away.
Any suggestions?
Niki
On Tue, March 3, 2015 9:41 am, info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Hi,
I just had the weirdest of system crashed. Here goes.
I wanted to install a desktop step by step, as I usually do. First the base system, then the X Window System, then the WindowMaker window manager. Everything went OK, then I installed kmod-nvidia from ELRepo. Yum informed me that the driver conflicted with x11-glamor (something like that), so I removed the corresponding package.
While doing all this, the system still defaulted to boot in console mode (meaning multi-user.target and not graphical.target). To test X, I just launched WindowMaker using startx.
Anyway, I rebooted, and then... nothing. System refused even to startup, and systemd suggested to me that I open journalctl (which taught me nothing).
Right now I've started a Slax LiveCD to backup all my data and reinstall the whole thing from scratch. I don't have the slightest clue as to what could possibly have happened here. The only thing I wonder: could it be that installing the kmod-nvidia driver while booting to a default console (and not graphical) could lead to this weirdness? A previous installation on that machine went OK, but the difference was that the first time, I started with a full GNOME installation right away.
Any suggestions?
If I were to troubleshoot this I would do it the following way: 1. wipe everything and set up standard desktop set with Xwindow 2. install nvidia driver 3. remove packages you don't like and replace them with the ones you like to achieve your final configuration
Why? Because all usually is tested in pretty much standard set of packages, thus if you follow the route above you will unlikely have your box bricked after installing nvidia driver. Then in step 3 you will discover doing which of your customizations breaks things. I call it for myself lazy person easy path approach ;-)
Just my $0.02.
Valeri
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
On Tue, 3 Mar 2015, info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Any suggestions?
There are multiple nvidia drivers in Elrepo, depending on the model of video card. Install and run nvidia-detect to find out which driver you need; just installing the "kmod-nvidia" package is not guaranteed to give you a working driver.
Steve
Le 03.03.2015 17:00, Steve Thompson a écrit :
On Tue, 3 Mar 2015, info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Any suggestions?
There are multiple nvidia drivers in Elrepo, depending on the model of video card. Install and run nvidia-detect to find out which driver you need; just installing the "kmod-nvidia" package is not guaranteed to give you a working driver.
I used nvidia-detect, and installed kmod-nvidia. Even then, the previous installation ran kmod-nvidia with success on twin monitors.
And even then, installing the wrong NVidia driver should only result in X failing to start... but not in a system that won't even *boot*. Startup messages stopped short immediately, I'd say right after initramfs was loaded.
On a side note: before using CentOS, I ran Slackware for a few years, so I know how to configure X and video drivers manually. I've never seen this sort of weird crash.
Niki
Steve _______________________________________________ CentOS mailing list CentOS@centos.org http://lists.centos.org/mailman/listinfo/centos
On Tue, Mar 03, 2015 at 05:08:10PM +0100, info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Le 03.03.2015 17:00, Steve Thompson a écrit :
On Tue, 3 Mar 2015, info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Any suggestions?
There are multiple nvidia drivers in Elrepo, depending on the model of video card. Install and run nvidia-detect to find out which driver you need; just installing the "kmod-nvidia" package is not guaranteed to give you a working driver.
I used nvidia-detect, and installed kmod-nvidia. Even then, the previous installation ran kmod-nvidia with success on twin monitors.
This might have to do with the NVidia update, explained on the elrepo pages.
http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia
You may have an older card that will require the 340xx versions of the various NVidia tools.
Le 03/03/2015 18:45, Scott Robbins a écrit :
This might have to do with the NVidia update, explained on the elrepo pages.
http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia
You may have an older card that will require the 340xx versions of the various NVidia tools.
No, it's a GT520 which is supposed to work with the latest driver.
info@microlinux.fr wrote:
I just had the weirdest of system crashed. Here goes.
I wanted to install a desktop step by step, as I usually do. First the base system, then the X Window System, then the WindowMaker window manager. Everything went OK, then I installed kmod-nvidia from ELRepo. Yum informed me that the driver conflicted with x11-glamor (something like that), so I removed the corresponding package.
That would be the openGL libraries. kmod-nvidia will install its own.
While doing all this, the system still defaulted to boot in console mode (meaning multi-user.target and not graphical.target). To test X, I just launched WindowMaker using startx.
Anyway, I rebooted, and then... nothing. System refused even to startup, and systemd suggested to me that I open journalctl (which taught me nothing).
I'm a tad confused: you say "nothing", and that system refused to startup, but systemd is talking. Where is it in the bootup? What happens if you edit the grub kernel line one time, to s, so that it boots to single user mode? <snip> mark
On Tue, Mar 03, 2015 at 04:41:01PM +0100, info@microlinux.fr wrote:
Anyway, I rebooted, and then... nothing. System refused even to startup, and systemd suggested to me that I open journalctl (which taught me nothing).
This doesn't make any sense. You said 'nothing' but it also suggested you run journalctl? So it wasn't nothing. What exactly did it do? Did it drop into the rescue shell? Did it kernel panic? Did you see some text then the screen blanked?
Did you try older any older kernels that might have been loaded?
One of the things that the nvidia driver adds is "nouveau.modeset=0 rdblacklist=nouveau" to the kernel arguments. Do you see them? I know that we saw the kernel panic when the nouveau driver was loaded on a el6.6 system with an NVidia K620, so perhaps when you brought in X11 you also installed the nouveau drivers?
Le 03/03/2015 19:25, Jonathan Billings a écrit :
One of the things that the nvidia driver adds is "nouveau.modeset=0 rdblacklist=nouveau" to the kernel arguments. Do you see them? I know that we saw the kernel panic when the nouveau driver was loaded on a el6.6 system with an NVidia K620, so perhaps when you brought in X11 you also installed the nouveau drivers?
One thing I did this time was to make sure there weren't any incompatible drivers (like 'nouveau') installed *before* actually installing and configuring kmod-nvidia. Now everything works as expected.
I can't be sure 100 %, but I think this was the culprit.
Cheers,
Niki
On 03/03/15 18:47, Niki Kovacs wrote:
Le 03/03/2015 19:25, Jonathan Billings a écrit :
One of the things that the nvidia driver adds is "nouveau.modeset=0 rdblacklist=nouveau" to the kernel arguments. Do you see them? I know that we saw the kernel panic when the nouveau driver was loaded on a el6.6 system with an NVidia K620, so perhaps when you brought in X11 you also installed the nouveau drivers?
One thing I did this time was to make sure there weren't any incompatible drivers (like 'nouveau') installed *before* actually installing and configuring kmod-nvidia. Now everything works as expected.
The elrepo nvidia drivers will disable the nouveau driver automatically so you don't need to worry about things like that.
Don't over-think it. I would recommend you just set up your system the way you want it with at least a minimal working Xorg installation, and fully updated. Then just:
yum install nvidia-detect yum install $(nvidia-detect)
and reboot, and you should be good to go.
I can't be sure 100 %, but I think this was the culprit.
Cheers,
Niki
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info＠microlinux.fr -
Jonathan Billings -
m.roth＠5-cent.us -
Ned Slider -
Niki Kovacs
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Scott Robbins -
Steve Thompson -
Valeri Galtsev