Recent updates of Fedora 11 and 12 seems to make Nvidia driver not usable in Maya 7 and 2009 in two of our test machine at my client. I usually use the driver provided by RPM Fusion but this time round, Maya kept reporting Signal 11 error just as it was about to finish starting up. Using Maya’s Crash Reporting environment variable which kept pointing to libc and TWindow, I thought at first it could be a glibc incompatibility issue. However rolling back glibc does not seem to solve the problem. Finally, just out of gut feeling, I removed kmod-nvidia and install the driver (190.53) provided by Nvidia and voila!! Problem solve.
On a different machine, we have i7core with 6GiB of RAM and an NVidia GTX275 with 896MiB of Video RAM. An error along the line of “/dev/nvidia0 input/output error” kept preventing the machine from starting up X window. After searching on Google for two weeks, a not so obvious answer emerges. I don’t understand the solution but it has something to do with the kernel allocating virtual memory. The default is 128MiB and for reasons unknown to me, its not enough to get GTX275 started even though it was not a problem previously on Fedora 10. The solution is to increase the “vmalloc” for the kernel via keying in the value in the kernel parameters in grub.conf. After I added “vmalloc=256M”, X-Window started up in its full glory!!
