Hi dododge:
Thank you for sharing and chiming in. Like you, I hope somebody from nVidia can help us to identify why the driver fails and help to get it fixed.
I also noticed that I had a difficult time getting an older driver to work with the newer kernels, and I also had the similar problem with using the older drivers; for example, it would also crash and especially produced some very nasty artifacts (e.g. using compiz fusion/beryl effects in KDE). This is a Gentoo system, so this behavior might not just be confined to Ubuntu. The artifacts were especially nasty - I couldn’t keep running with the older drivers.
Thank you again for the feedback and your post.
Hi,
I have the same problem on Fedora 20 with NVIDIA Quadro FX 880M.
NVIDIA Driver Version: 331.89
[ 10.265] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to allocate sofware rendering cache surface: out of
[ 10.265] (EE) NVIDIA(0): memory.
[ 10.265] (EE) NVIDIA(0): *** Aborting ***
[ 11.334] (EE)
[ 11.335] (EE) AddScreen/ScreenInit failed for driver 0
[ 11.335] (EE)
[ 11.335] (EE)
[ 11.335] (EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information.
[ 11.335] (EE)
[ 11.335] (EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.
Driver 343.13 is also non-functional under Xen Dom0; same problem.
[ 14.312] (II) NVIDIA GLX Module 343.13 Thu Jul 31 18:36:09 PDT 2014
...
[ 16.842] (EE) NVIDIA(0): Failed to allocate sofware rendering cache surface: out of
[ 16.842] (EE) NVIDIA(0): memory.
FYI: I finally got 319.82 (with the 3.13 kernel patch) packaged and installed “properly” under Xubuntu 14.04, so that the libraries are properly visible to applications. This does let me run the X server under Xen Dom0, but OpenGL applications are still a disaster. glxgears reports ~4 FPS; Unigine Valley brings up its menus but does not display its scenery; the Steam client starts up its main window but chews 100% of a core and is non-responsive to mouse clicks; launching Euro Truck Simulator reconfigures the displays and then segfaults, leaving the desktop in a state that xrandr is unable to fix (but thankfully nvidia-settings can still restore the proper layout). After leaving it screen-locked overnight, when I tried to unlock it one of the screens suddenly went blank and the X server started chewing up CPU time.
If I boot the same system, with the same driver, natively instead of under Xen Dom0, everything seems to be fine. Steam, ETS2, Unigine, glxgears, etc. they all run normally with full acceleration.
So even though the 319.82 driver appears to function under Xen Dom0, there are lots of OpenGL problems that are only present under Xen. It’s probably okay for desktop and development apps, but virtualized OpenGL seems to be a no-go. In my case, the whole point with this machine was to be able to run Linux and Windows with high-speed OpenGL at the same time (using VGA passthrough to give a second card to Windows), so it now looks like I’m going to have to give up on virtualization and just build an entire second machine :-(.
Hi dodoge,
Thank you for reporting your findings. Before you give up, you should try nouveau (cringe). All kidding aside, it’s come a long way in recent times.
I am with you - I also want to have the best of both worlds with xen, guests, and the accelerated 3D but this problem needs to get fixed first. Please notice again that the 319.82 is an older version and not having this new error message. I found the same was true for the 319.49 version that I mentioned in a previous post (which isn’t too far away from the 319.82 you’re testing with here). It’s too bad that nvidia has given this issue little attention.
Anybody ever going to attend to the lack of Xen support, it’s 2017 now?