NVIDIA/nvidia-installer

NVIDIA/nvidia-installer

Description: NVIDIA driver installer

Language: C

License: GPL-2.0

Stars: 153

Forks: 32

Open issues: 9

Created: 2012-09-12T20:54:50Z

Pushed: 2026-06-18T00:39:14Z

Default branch: main

Fork: no

Archived: no

README: __________________________________________________________________________

NVIDIA-INSTALLER SOURCE DOCUMENTATION __________________________________________________________________________

Information on how to use the nvidia-installer is in:

Chapter 4. Installing the NVIDIA Driver

of the NVIDIA driver README (available from the NVIDIA Linux driver download page, and installed in /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/).

There is not currently any formal documentation describing the implementation of nvidia-installer, but the source code is fairly well commented.

Build dependencies of nvidia-installer include:

ncurses pciutils

Please ensure that the appropriate development packages for these dependencies have been installed before building nvidia-installer.

One interesting thing to note is that user interface shared libraries are built into nvidia-installer to avoid potential problems with the installer not being able to find the user interface libraries (or finding the wrong ones, etc): after the shared lib is built, the utility gen-ui-array is run on it to create a source file storing a byte array of the data that is the shared library. When the installer runs, it writes this byte data to a temporary file and then dlopens() it.

This directory also contains source for a simple tool 'mkprecompiled', which is used for stamping nv-linux.o's (aka the kernel interfaces) with the necessary information so that the installer can match it to a running kernel. nvidia-installer can automate the process of building a precompiled kernel interface package when used with the installer's "--add-this-kernel" option - mkprecompiled is a standalone utility that can be used to build a precompiled kernel interface package independently of nvidia-installer.

To build a precompiled kernel interface package using mkprecompiled, you might do the following:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-XXX.YY.run --extract-only cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86-XXX.YY/kernel/ modules=head -n 4 ../.manifest | tail -n 1 interface_files=for module in $modules; do echo $module | grep -v nvidia-uvm | sed -e 's/nvidia/nv/' -e 's/$/-linux.o/' done make $interface_files for interface in $interface_files; do nv_stem=echo $interface | sed 's/-linux.o$//' module_name=echo $nv_stem | sed 's/nv/nvidia/' ../mkprecompiled --pack precompiled-mykernel \ --driver-version XXX.YY \ --proc-version-string "cat /proc/version" \ --description "This is not an interesting description" \ --kernel-interface $interface \ --linked-module-name $module_name.ko \ --core-object-name $module_name/$nv_stem-kernel.o_binary \ --target-directory . done if [ -f nvidia-uvm.ko ]; then ../mkprecompiled --pack precompiled-mykernel \ --kernel-module nvidia-uvm.ko \ --target-directory . fi mkdir -p precompiled mv precompiled-mykernel precompiled

(where "XXX.YY" is replaced with the driver version number).

To build precompiled kernel interfaces for a kernel other than the currently running one, set SYSSRC=/path/to/kernel-source on the make command line. If your kernel sources use a separate output directory, additionally set SYSOUT=/path/to/kernel-output. You will also need to extract the correct proc version string from the kernel image, so that it can be passed as an argument to mkprecompiled, e.g.:

/path/to/kernel-source/scripts/extract-vmlinux /boot/vmlinuz | strings | grep "^Linux version"

nvidia-installer will scan the contents of the kernel/precompiled/ directory for any precompiled kernel interfaces that match the running kernel's /proc/version string.

If you would like to provide precompiled kernel interfaces for others to use, you may build them as above. To use them, users can do the following:

sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-XXX.YY.run --extract-only mkdir -p NVIDIA-Linux-x86-XXX.YY/kernel/precompiled cp precompiled-mykernel NVIDIA-Linux-x86-XXX.YY/kernel/precompiled ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86-XXX.YY/nvidia-installer

(Updated: 2003-09-23) The search path for directories containing precompiled kernel interfaces has been extended; the heuristic is now:

• if --precompiled-kernel-interfaces-path was specified, search

in that directory; if no match found, then

• search in the directory /lib/modules/precompiled/uname -r/nvidia/gfx/,

if no match found, then

• search in the usr/src/nv/precompiled directory of the .run file,

if no match found, then

• give up and just build the kernel module yourself

TODO:

• Add new user interfaces (gtk+/qt/your toolkit of choice).

• Add additional tests to be run for the '--sanity' option.

• Cleanup memory leaks.

• Improve error messages.

• Internationalization.

Patches are very welcome, and may be submitted to linux-bugs@nvidia.com