Nvidia Graphics Workstations - HP Z1 Maintenance And Service Manual

NVIDIA Graphics Workstations

Some HP Z1 workstation configurations come with NVIDIA Quadro graphics hardware. HP
recommends the use of NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers for best results on Linux systems. Driver
versions of 295.20 or higher are qualified for HP Z1 workstation applications.
HP also provides recommended versions of the drivers with RPM-compatible installers for RHEL and
SLED distributions. These are available from the HP Installer Kit for Linux and from workstation driver
repositories on hp.com. When HP installers are used, their contents and documentation links are
installed in the /opt/hp/nvidia folder.
When installing Linux on an HP Z1 workstation that contains an NVIDIA card, administrators should
select a VESA-compatible driver to avoid the instability that is experienced with some open-source
versions of the Nouveau and DRM drivers.
Open source versions of Nouveau drivers and NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers cannot coexist in
the same runtime environment because they use the same hardware resources. If administrators
create their own Linux environments using NVIDIA proprietary graphics drivers but choose not to use
HP-packaged versions, HP recommends that they manually append the following boot loader
parameters to properly suppress the Nouveau driver at runtime (grub example below):
kernel /vmlinuz ... rdblacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0
This action is applied by HP installers but must be applied/restored under other circumstances.
To customize the display characteristics and resolutions of an NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver
environment, execute the following command:
/usr/bin/nvidia-settings
To create and manipulate the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, execute the following command:
/usr/bin/nvidia-xconfig
96 Appendix A Linux technical notes