VMD-L Mailing List

From: Axel Kohlmeyer (akohlmey_at_gmail.com)
Date: Wed Sep 18 2013 - 14:48:11 CDT

On Wed, Sep 18, 2013 at 8:43 PM, Gianluca Interlandi
<gianluca_at_u.washington.edu> wrote:
> Dear VMD list,
>
> I think that this question was asked previously. I wonder whether anybody
> has had the same problem and found a solution.
>
> I am trying to open VMD remotely. The server where VMD is started from has
> an ATI video card with the fglrx driver, while the client where VMD should
> appear has NVIDIA with the proprietary driver. VMD crashes with
> "segmentation fault". Also, "glxgears" and "glxinfo" crash with
> "segmentation fault". Everything runs fine though locally on both desktops.
>
> I found that setting the following variable can help improve things:
>
> setenv LIBGL_ALWAYS_INDIRECT y
>
> After setting that, glxgears works and VMD can be started. However, as soon
> as I try loading a molecule into VMD the entire Xorg on the client crashes.
> Has anybody had the same problem and found a solution?
>
> Interestingly, everything works fine if I open VMD remotely from a server
> that has NVIDIA to a client with NVIDIA.
>
> Would it help to compile VMD against mesaGL if this problem is related to
> openGL?

yes. if you have a version of VMD linked against Mesa it will work
since it will use an OpenGL on the remote machine, so no OpenGL gets
transported over X (via GLX) but only plain X11, but Mesa is a rather
sad OpenGL and horribly slow. i've done this in the past to deal
particularly with broken intel OpenGL drivers (not needed anymore,
yay!!).

here is an alternate version that has worked for me quite well:
i take the shared libraries installed by the nvidia driver on the
local machine and copy them to a directory on the remote machine and
then set LD_LIBRARY_PATH so that this directory comes *first*. we use
this with several versions of the nvidia driver on our clusters and it
works nicely. people just load the nvidia-glx module when they have an
nvidia card on their desktop and remote display of VMD is working
nicely. details below.

[akohlmey_at_login4 ~]$ /bin/ls -l /opt/apps/nvidia-glx-310.44/
total 85508
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 10 May 2 08:01 libGL.so -> libGL.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 15 May 2 07:58 libGL.so.1 -> libGL.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 1099504 Mar 27 18:10 libGL.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 21296 Mar 27 18:18 libOpenCL.so.1.0.0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 12 May 2 08:01 libcuda.so -> libcuda.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 17 May 2 08:00 libcuda.so.1 ->
libcuda.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 10322958 Mar 27 18:25 libcuda.so.310.44
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 15 May 2 08:01 libnvcuvid.so ->
libnvcuvid.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 20 May 2 08:00 libnvcuvid.so.1 ->
libnvcuvid.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 2363440 Mar 27 18:57 libnvcuvid.so.310.44
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 18 May 2 08:01 libnvidia-cfg.so ->
libnvidia-cfg.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 23 May 2 08:00 libnvidia-cfg.so.1
-> libnvidia-cfg.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 148960 Mar 27 18:56 libnvidia-cfg.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 27749808 Mar 27 18:57 libnvidia-compiler.so.310.44
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 21 May 2 08:01 libnvidia-encode.so
-> libnvidia-encode.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 26 May 2 08:00
libnvidia-encode.so.1 -> libnvidia-encode.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 135648 Mar 27 18:57 libnvidia-encode.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 36543952 Mar 27 18:09 libnvidia-glcore.so.310.44
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 17 May 2 08:01 libnvidia-ml.so ->
libnvidia-ml.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 22 May 2 08:00 libnvidia-ml.so.1
-> libnvidia-ml.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 394280 Mar 27 18:56 libnvidia-ml.so.310.44
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 21 May 2 08:01 libnvidia-opencl.so
-> libnvidia-opencl.so.1
lrwxrwxrwx 1 install install 26 May 2 08:00
libnvidia-opencl.so.1 -> libnvidia-opencl.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 8613332 Mar 27 18:18 libnvidia-opencl.so.310.44
-rwxr-xr-x 1 install install 11736 Mar 27 18:13 libnvidia-tls.so.310.44
drwxr-xr-x 2 install install 4096 May 2 08:00 tls

[akohlmey_at_login4 ~]$ module display nvidia-glx/310.44
-------------------------------------------------------------------
/opt/apps/modulefiles/nvidia-glx/310.44:

module-whatis Nvidia OpenGL and GLX runtime libraries
prepend-path LD_LIBRARY_PATH /opt/apps/nvidia-glx-310.44
-------------------------------------------------------------------

>
> Thanks,
>
> Gianluca
>
> -----------------------------------------------------
> Gianluca Interlandi, PhD gianluca_at_u.washington.edu
> +1 (206) 685 4435
> http://artemide.bioeng.washington.edu/
>
> Research Scientist at the Department of Bioengineering
> at the University of Washington, Seattle WA U.S.A.
> http://healthynaturalbaby.org
> ----------------------------------------------------- 

-- 
Dr. Axel Kohlmeyer  akohlmey_at_gmail.com  http://goo.gl/1wk0
International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste. Italy.