VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Tue Apr 24 2007 - 16:19:59 CDT

Hi,
  There are a few possibilities...
The video card in the Altix is almost certainly not the same as the
one in your laptop (if the Altix even has one). I think you have confused
the remote display connection to your laptop with what is on the Altix.
Unless you're sitting at a machine console for the Altix and running
glxinfo etc from there, the results you see from those commands are
derived from the hardware on the console of the machine you're using.

The Altix is a 64-bit bit machine, so when you run VMD on the Altix
but remote-display it to your laptop, you are using the 64-bit OpenGL
interface of your XFree86. From what I have seen, the 64-bit NVIDIA
drivers aren't exporting the GLSL extensions yet, and this is verified
by the output from 'glxinfo' that you provided in your previous email.
Since the Altix is 64-bit only, you don't have the ability to run a
32-bit VMD and display that to your laptop.

So, at the present time the only option is to get a 64-bit OpenGL
driver that supports GLSL. So far as I know, none of the 64-bit
drivers from any of the vendors do GLSL yet.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 05:00:20PM -0400, Nichols A. Romero wrote:
> Yes, the machine that I ssh (kerborized) into is an SGI Altix. My local
> machine is a laptop, but they appear to have
> the same graphics card. In order to get GLSL rendering working on my laptop,
> I had to update the NVIDIA drivers.
>
> So, is the problem the SSH or the NVIDIA driver on the Altix?
>
> On 4/24/07, John Stone <johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu> wrote:
> >
> >
> >Hi,
> > The output of glxinfo indicates that your driver isn't exporting
> >the GLSL extensions. In fact, the only extra features you're getting are
> >the multitexture extension and a stencil buffer. It appears that you're
> >attaching through 'ssh', guessing by your DISPLAY variable being set
> >to "localhost:10.0". That combined with the fact that you appear to be
> >remote displaying onto a remote laptop may be the reason for problems.
> >What happens when you run VMD locally on the laptop? (the machine with
> >the Quadro FX Go1400 in it, which I'm assuming is NOT the Altix...)
> >
> >Cheers,
> > John Stone
> > vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu
> >
> >On Tue, Apr 24, 2007 at 04:40:57PM -0400, Nichols A. Romero wrote:
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> This is on SGI Altix. 16-processors box, using VMD 1.8.5 (I know that I
> >need
> >> to upgrade).
> >>
> >> Receiving following message on start up.
> >> Info) Multithreading available, 16 CPUs detected.
> >> Xlib: extension "XFree86-DRI" missing on display "localhost:10.0".
> >> Info) OpenGL renderer: Quadro FX Go1400/PCI/SSE2
> >> Info) Features: STENCIL MTX
> >> Info) GLSL rendering mode is NOT available.
> >> Info) Textures: 2-D (4096x4096), 3-D (512x512x512), Multitexture (4)
> >> Found 1 plugins or data handlers in directory
> >> '/usr/people/naromero/vmd-1.8.5/lib/plugins/LINUXIA64/molfile'.
> >>
> >> Is the lack of GLSL rendering a XFree86 problem or an NVIDIA driver
> >problem?
> >>
> >> I attach the glxinfo output.
> >>
> >> --
> >> Nichols A. Romero, Ph.D.
> >> 1613 Denise Dr. Apt. D
> >> Forest Hill, MD 21050
> >> 443-567-8328 (C)
> >> 410-306-0709 (O)
> >
> >
> >
> >--
> >NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
> >Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
> >University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
> >Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu Phone: 217-244-3349
> > WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/ Fax: 217-244-6078
> >
>
>
>
> --
> Nichols A. Romero, Ph.D.
> 1613 Denise Dr. Apt. D
> Forest Hill, MD 21050
> 443-567-8328 (C)
> 410-306-0709 (O) 

-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois, 405 N. Mathews Ave, Urbana, IL 61801
Email: johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu                 Phone: 217-244-3349
  WWW: http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/~johns/      Fax: 217-244-6078