On 3/5/07, Charles Curley charlescurley@charlescurley.com wrote:

On Sat, Mar 03, 2007 at 11:33:07AM -0700, Charles Curley wrote:

...

I have two machines that use livna kmod packages, one kmod-ntfs, the other a Radeon fglrx driver. I've been using the ntfs drivers sucessfully for several months. I have just installed the Radeon card, so cannot be sure this isn't a new installation issue.

Followup. This morning's updates brought the missing kernel in, and I installed it. I now have two kernels of what apprear to be the same major, minor and patch numbers on my system:

kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.6.4.fc6.i686 kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6.i686

Huh?

I went ahead with the normal stuff to get the driver enabled. Running glxgears indicated that the system now runs slower than it did before I installed the driver. Again, Huh?

I finally rebooted. On the way up, the system locked up. I rebooted again. The system came up, and glxgears reports speeds ranging between 500 and 1000 fps, not exactly a steady rate. However, GoogleEarth now works at a reasonable rate.

Even though glxgears is not a benchmarking tool, you should let it sit and it will eventually give a steady framerate. If there are problems in 3D acceleration with a closed source driver from a third party repository then those problems should be addressed with the proper people. Fedora in general really has no say in these matters.

• Why is a reboot necessary to install a driver module? Why are two

reboots necessary to install a driver module? This is not Windows.

A reboot is typically not necessary to install a module. However if that module is linked to a specific kernel version, then you must be booted into *that* specific kernel to use (load) it. Since there is no way to restart a kernel, any kernel update will require a reboot to start that kernel.

Some kernel modules don't work well being inserted into and removed from the running kernel. Some can't be removed at all once inserted without a reboot. Considering you are using a propreitary closed source kernel module and with the limited information you provided, it is hard to say whether or not all of your reboots were entirely necessary.

• Why do I need what appears to be two different installations of the

same kernel on my system?

These are 2 different kernels: kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.fc6 was released Feb 13 (based on 2.6.19.3) kernel-2.6.19-1.2911.6.4.fc6 was released Mar 2 (based on 2.6.19.5)

You don't need both of them. You 'yum' installed them. Typically more than 1 kernel is left when using yum like this. Eventually old kernels get removed.

I'm getting irritated at Fedora being a bit too bleeding edge for my taste. I have work to do, and can't afford the time I spend farting around with this stuff. Maybe I should join Mr. Raymond over at Ubuntu.

It would appear from your previous email that the livna repository had already synced and recompiled to 2.6.19-1.2911.6.4. Apparently the particular fedora mirror you were using was out of sync. There will always be lags in syncing mirrors.

I like Ubuntu. It is a fine distribution. If it better suits your needs, by all means, please do use it.

-Mauriat

On 3/5/07, Marc Wilson msw@cox.net wrote:

On Mon, Mar 05, 2007 at 09:39:32AM -0700, Charles Curley wrote:

...

I'm getting irritated at Fedora being a bit too bleeding edge for my taste. I have work to do, and can't afford the time I spend farting around with this stuff.

So why'd you install the update, then? I must have missed the gun being held to your head.

To be fair, this problem would have occured to him even if he was not intentionally trying to update his kernel. If he had done a first time installation of the driver and livna gave him the newest driver then the kernel update would have been non-optional.

I get this question often: Why does installing a simple driver require a full kernel update and subsequent updates of *all* my drivers?

-Mauriat