Difficulties getting nvidia-driver to work with latest x.org ports

[Tom Evans]

On Tue, 2009-02-03 at 12:31 -0800, Kevin Oberman wrote:
> > From: Tom Evans <tevans.uk at googlemail.com>
> > Date: Tue, 03 Feb 2009 18:08:44 +0000
> > Sender: owner-freebsd-x11 at freebsd.org
> > 
> > Hi all
> > 
> > This weekend, I installed 7.1-RELEASE on my home PC (base only). I then
> > updated to RELENG_7, updated the ports tree to the latest, and went
> > about installing the latest x.org ports.
> > 
> > First off, the new xorg seems to have a bad bad regression - Xorg
> > -configure is now largely useless, it generated a config with just
> > ridiculous config. I'm still at work, but I'll post it when I get home,
> > just crazy. It's still pretty simple to write from scratch though, so
> > not too disastrous.
> > 
> > Secondly, and much worse, it seems the nvidia-driver is built against an
> > older ABI incompatible version of xorg-server. It installs a
> > library /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/libwfb.so which has a missing symbol
> > "miZeroLineScreenIndex". I found this recent article[1] which seems to
> > suggest replacing the nvidia installed version with the xorg version,
> > which sounds dubious imho (I dont speak/read/understand Japanese at all,
> > that may not be at all what it is saying!)
> > I tried updating from the latest version in ports (177.80) to the latest
> > on nvidias website (180.22), but they both still referred to
> > miZeroLineScreenIndex.
> > 
> > I'll post full details of installed packages etc when I get home.
> > Thankfully, the nv driver seems to work reasonabley well now in 2D!
> > 
> > If I was going to roll back xserver, what else would I need to roll
> > back? Presumabley all drivers? libX11? My ports is a locally slaved CVS
> > checkout as described in development(7), so this should be reasonabley
> > straight forward...
> 
> I have been holding off on the new xorg until some of the dust settles,
> but I suggest that you re-install nvidia-driver. This has fixed the
> problem in the past.

I followed the sage Japanese advice, and symlinked to the xorg version
of libwfb.so rather than the nvidia one. I have no ideas of the effects
of doing this, or what libwfb is for, but this works for getting the
driver to work, including DRI and enough OpenGL to drive compiz.

For the archive, the error I was getting after a stock install of the
nvidia-driver port was[1]:

(II) Loading /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so
dlopen: /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so: Undefined symbol
"miZeroLineScreenIndex"
(EE) Failed to load /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules//libwfb.so
(II) UnloadModule: "wfb"
(EE) Failed to load module "wfb" (loader failed, 7)
...
(EE) NVIDIA(0): Need libwfb but wfbScreenInit not found

Fatal server error:

The fix was:

cd /usr/local/lib/xorg/modules ; ln -hsf XXX* libwfb.so

This worked with both the current version in ports (177.80) and with
nvidias latest (180.22).

Cheers

Tom

[1] http://freebsd.nubtek.com/logs/nvidia-libwfb.so.Xorg.0.log