Bug 16897

Summary:	Support for multiple nvidia cards
Product:	xorg	Reporter:	Jason Long <jason>
Component:	Driver/nouveau	Assignee:	Nouveau Project <nouveau>
Status:	RESOLVED WORKSFORME	QA Contact:	Xorg Project Team <xorg-team>
Severity:	normal
Priority:	medium	CC:	elbeardmorez, przanoni
Version:	unspecified
Hardware:	x86 (IA32)
OS:	Linux (All)
Whiteboard:
i915 platform:		i915 features:

Description Jason Long 2008-07-29 19:07:49 UTC

I have two (rather old) nvidia cards in my PC.
 * GeForce4 MX 420
 * RIVA TNT2

I used these two cards to create a multi-seat setup with Fedora 8. (I used the proprietary nvidia driver). It worked great.

When I upgraded to Fedora 9, I found that the proprietary driver wasn't supported, so I'm giving Nouveau a try. I'm finding that Nouveau can only deal with one card at a time, apparently. When I start X with the second card, the second monitor does not light up and X apparently locks up.

Surprisingly, I couldn't find an existing bugzilla entry for supporting multiple cards, so now I'm creating one. Hope that's ok.

(PS- I have some time in the next few weeks, and I'm a pretty good C programmer. Is this a bug that one could get into the code and fix in a few weeks, or are we talking major rewrite of the driver?)

Comment 1 Maarten Maathuis 2008-07-30 15:51:23 UTC

As far as i know the problem is two fold (this is from hearsay and other impressions).

One side of the problem seems to be that somehow the 2nd ddx(xorg driver) doesn't associate itself appropriately with the 2nd card/drm/kernel driver. This is not neccesarily a huge problem to fix, just a matter of finding it.

The other side is that randr-1.2 doesn't support xinerama, so you will have to run two completely seperate xserver's. This is something that is well beyond the scope of a small'ish fix.

Comment 2 Stuart Bennett 2009-01-13 16:28:54 UTC

*** Bug 16597 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 3 Younes Manton 2009-04-11 13:31:42 UTC

*** Bug 16165 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***

Comment 4 Martin Peres 2013-08-13 03:17:03 UTC

Nouveau should support multicard pretty well: http://nouveau.freedesktop.org/wiki/FeatureMatrix/

Use of freedesktop.org services, including Bugzilla, is subject to our Code of Conduct. How we collect and use information is described in our Privacy Policy.