2 dual-head PCIe NVIDIA cards to be one screen

[Andy Ritger]

On Tue, 2 May 2006, Alex Deucher wrote:

> On 5/2/06, Christian Parpart <trapni at gentoo.org> wrote:
> > On Tuesday 02 May 2006 20:09, Jay R. Ashworth wrote:
> > > On Tue, May 02, 2006 at 07:01:38PM +0200, Christian Parpart wrote:
> > > > Now, our goal is to have a wide screen for X to spread over those 3 TFT
> > > > displays using the two PCIe NVIDIA gards (both dual-head, as said).
> > > >
> > > > However, we encountered several problems in getting X finding the both
> > > > cards (Xorg 7.0), so he contacted some users at the #irc channel which
> > > > couldn't help much, which is - in fact - why I'm writing here.
> > > >
> > > > Does anyone of you have any kind of expriences in connecting *more* than
> > > > two display devices to X11 and let them serve a desktop?
> > > >
> > > > Most ideally is, to get then OpenGL running atop of the 3 desktop, in
> > > > fullscreen resolution (3*1280x1024 = 3840x1024) to play a game within it.
> > >
> > > Well, I did this last year on a SuSE 9.0 machine, with what I believe
> > > was Xfree, and it Just Worked. The machine took 2 or 3 passes to
> > > detect all three graphics cards, but all I had to do was turn on
> > > Xinerama (as I recall it, or whatever it was called in the XF days, and
> > > the desktop spanned all three cards.
> > >
> > > I would tentatively have to assume that if that's stopped working,
> > > something's Broke.
> >
> > so is Xinerama also fine with OpenGL - most ideally with NVIDIA cards - too?
> > Well, okay, I'gonna push him for given xinerama a trial as soon as we found
> > some howtos on getting xinerama working :)
> 
> I'm not too familiar with nvidia's driver, but normally xinerama
> doesn't work with direct rendering.

NVIDIA's OpenGL implementation supports direct rendering OpenGL
in Xinerama.  See the following link for details:

    http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-8756/README/appendix-v.html

The nvidia-xconfig(1) utility, distributed with the NVIDIA driver,
should be helpful in configuring multiple GPUs with Xinerama.  See the
man page for details, but something like this should get you started:

    nvidia-xconfig --enable-all-gpus --xinerama

I hope that helps,
- Andy Ritger


> Alex
> 
> >
> > Thanks so far,
> > Christian Parpart.
> >
> _______________________________________________
> xorg mailing list
> xorg at lists.freedesktop.org
> http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/xorg
>