problem with ldconfig; nvidia loading fixed

[Chuck Robey]

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Ben Kaduk wrote:
> Hi Chuck,
> 
> On 2/28/08, Chuck Robey <chuckr at chuckr.org> wrote:
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> [snip RAID/loader interaction]
>>  Well, the other thing that's come up, I can't get my nvidia driver to work
>>  along with xorg.  It used to show it's arrival both in kldstat, AND also
>>  because, in /dev, a file named nvidiactl would show up.  This has stopped
>>  happening.  I had been using the old version 100.14.19, and when I checked
>>  the nvidia website, it seems a couple of newer versions had appeared, so I
>>  downloaded and built version 169.12.  Don't ask me why the crazy version
>>  numbering, I looked around for something like a changelog, but had no luck.
>>   Anyhow, updating to the newer version wasn't too hard, but didn't show any
>>  change.  Consulting the /var/log/Xorg.0.log file, even though kldstat says
>>  that nvidia.ko is loaded, it never shows a /dev/nvidiactl, and the log file
>>  says clearly that it never finds the Nvidia kernel module.  Using it with
>>  Vesa lets me limp, so I do that, but howcome?
> 
> The nvidia kernel module now needs to be loaded at boot-time;
> it won't supercede the default vga support if loaded later.
> 
> cat nvidia_load="YES"" >> /boot/loader.conf

I'd never heard that about it needing absolutely to load at boot time, but
you were absolutely right, I have it working now.

It also made my loading problem (I don't know if I complained on hackers
about that or not).  No, in looking back to by send-cache, I don't think I
did,  Immediately after I finally got all my raid array proboems fixed, I
found really that there was only 1 remaining: booting my raid.

I have definitely the boot-manager loaded onto ad1 (my 100G emergency eide
disk) and da0 (my raid).  I normally would strike f1 to load the eide for
emergencies, and f5, then f1, to load from the raid.  Well, now, no matter
what I press, I load from the eide disk.  If I intercept the boot at the
beastie menu, and press 6 to get into the loader, I find currdev is
_always_ set to disk1s1a (the eide, ad1).  If I want to boot the raid, I
need to manually do a "set currdev=disk2s1a" then unload, then load the
kernel AND manually load all the modules, because loder.conf isn't getting
read either.

Once I went thru all that, the nvidia driver worked fine, as you predicted,
any notion why the loading has gone screwey?  I can add one thing:  When I
initially installed the system, I was just coming back from using Linux for
some years, and I forgot that while Linux is in love with using a small
/boot partition to store the kernels and the bootloader, FreeBSD isn't.  I
had stuck the /boot only onto da1s1d, with my root onto da0s1a.  I was
loading my root via /etc/fstab, I thought, but in fact, I had an old
version of a just-useable boot onto myu da1s1a, and that was what was
actually booting.  When I got rid of the /boot mount line in fstab, and
expected things to work ok, this odd refusal to correctly boot from
disk2s1a began.

Any idea here?  Booting is a real drag now.

thanks!

> 
> 
> -Ben Kaduk
> 
> 
>>  OK, I'm not giving my ldconfig problem to you folks, its quite likely its a
>>  FreeBSD-current problem, so let those folks handle that one.
>>
>>  Boy, I feel like the little boy who cried wolf!
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