The quest for triple head on Ubuntu with SLI GPU

February 5, 2014 in Linux, Ubuntu

I recently purchased a system from my friend to upgrade my old system, as I really wanted 3 monitors…

So, I might of bought a “Gibson” (No, not the guitar, if your on my blog you should get the reference!), but sadly I had tons of trouble getting the 3rd monitor to work under Ubuntu 13.10!

Enabling Xinerama in older nvidia drivers caused the system to hard freeze immediately on login.
Installing nvidia-331 from a third party PPA gave an option for “Base Mosaic”, but same issue….

However, I have been having extremely annoying problems with the system CPU freezing every so often having to hard restart… Ruled out hardware issue, works fine in Windows, but over 2 different 13.10 installs (one was a constant upgrade from 10.04, other was fresh to resolve many other issues I had), the problem was very consistent.

So, it was obviously an ubuntu specific problem. Well, one idea was to try installing 12.04, so I did that last night. Went to install nvidia driver (as I couldn’t even properly boot into the system with these SLI 590 GPU’s) and noticed a new driver on the list… nvidia-331-uvm.

Apparently this is some newer tech from nvidia for improving performance, but either it being uvm or 12.04, Base Mosiac now works.

So, if you are having problems with multi GPU (I have 4 GPU’s with these SLI cards), try 12.04 (or 14.04 when it is out) with nvidia-331-uvm or higher!

Now… here’s hoping 12.04 also fixes my lockup issue!