VirtualGL | Documentation / Installing VirtualGL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6

This page attempts to document the issues encountered when installing VirtualGL on Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, as well as workarounds for those issues (if known.) If you know of a better solution for any of the below, then please contact us.

Some of these issues may not be specific to Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and may affect other relatively recent distros as well, such as Fedora.

Installing 32-bit Libraries

In order to run 32-bit OpenGL applications in VirtualGL, it is necessary to install the 32-bit VirtualGL server components. These components depend on a few 32-bit system libraries. The x86-64 version of RHEL 6 does not have any 32-bit libraries installed by default, so it is necessary to install these before using the 32-bit version of VirtualGL. To do this:

As root:

Add multilib_policy=all to /etc/yum.conf
Edit /etc/yum/pluginconf.d/rhnplugin.conf and uncomment the lines that read:

[rhel-i386-server-5]
enabled = 1

Run the following commands:

rpm -q -a | sed 's@\.x86_64@@' | sed 's@\.noarch@@' | sort >out
yum install `cat out`

Now, yum update should pull in both i686 and x86-64 packages like RHEL 5 did.

In VirtualGL 2.2.x and prior, the 64-bit VirtualGL RPM also contained a 32-bit version of the VirtualGL server components. If you don't need to run 32-bit applications in VirtualGL, you could simply install this RPM with --nodeps and avoid having to install any 32-bit libraries.

Current versions of VirtualGL ship with separate 32-bit and 64-bit RPMs.

Installing the Proprietary nVidia Driver

As root:

Stop the X server (init 3)
Remove the X11 nouveau driver packages

rpm -e xorg-x11-drivers xorg-x11-drv-nouveau

Add rdblacklist=nouveau to the end of the "kernel" line in /boot/grub.conf
Reboot
Install the proprietary nVidia driver as you would normally
RHEL 6 has no xorg.conf file by default, so when the nVidia installer asks whether you want to run nvidia-xconfig to modify your xorg.conf file, answer Yes. This will create the xorg.conf file, which you can then modify to suit your needs.

vglgenkey Issues

Currently, the only known way to make vglgenkey work (vglgenkey is used to grant 3D X Server access to members of the vglusers group) is to disable SELinux. With SELinux enabled, the /usr/bin/xauth file is hidden within the context of the GDM startup scripts, so vglgenkey has no way of generating or importing an xauth key to /etc/opt/VirtualGL/vgl_xauth_key (and, for that matter, access is denied to /etc/opt/VirtualGL as well.)

Perhaps someone with a greater knowledge of SELinux can explain how to disable enforcement only for GDM and not the whole system.

vglserver_config Issues

There is currently no known way to disable the XTEST extension, because gdmsetup no longer exists.