Understanding Linux Graphics Stack

There are very few documents on Linux Graphics Stacks. In this post, I will collect some relatively well written documents on this topic.

• The Linux Graphics Stack
• The State of Linux Graphics
  • Though it is written old, 2005, it describes the broad landscape of technologies incuding XAA, EXA, X Render, DRI, Mesa, XGL, EGL, and so on.
• More explanations on DRI and other jargons 
• How to build and install full graphics stack from git
  • You will learn where the packages are and how to install.
• Introduction to Gallium3D
• Gallium3D Wikipedia
• X.org Events
  • X Developers’ Summit (XDS) and more
• How NVidia hardware works
• X.Org EVoC Work On Gallium3D OpenCL
• OpenCL 1.1 implementation on Gallium3D
• Accelerated OpenCL using Gallium3D

Installing Cuda on Ubuntu 11.10

Here are steps to install and configure Nvidia Cuda on Ubuntu 11.10

1. Install gcc 4.4, g++ 4.4, and cpp 4.4.
   • sudo apt-get install gcc-4.4 g++-4.4 cpp-4.4 build-essential
2. Create symbolic links for gcc 4.4
   • cd /usr/bin
   • sudo mkdir gcc44
   • cd gcc44
   • sudo ln -s /usr/bin/gcc-4.4 gcc
   • sudo ln -s /usr/bin/g++-4.4 g++
   • sudo ln -s /usr/bin/cpp-4.4 cpp
3. Install the nvidia drivers
   • sudo apt-get install nvidia-current nvidia-current-dev nvidia-current-updates nvidia-current-updates-dev
4. Download the current Cuda Toolkit and GPU Computing SDK for Ubuntu and the GPU Computing SDK, and save the .run files somewhere.
   • chmod +x *.run
   • sudo ./cudatoolkit_4.0.17_linux_32_ubuntu10.10.run
     • Install with default options including paths
   • ./gpucomputingsdk_4.0.17_linux.run
     • Install where you want to play.
5. For compiling the SDK examples, you also need to install
   • sudo apt-get install freeglut3-dev libxi-dev
   • sudo ln -s /usr/lib/libXmu.so.6 /usr/lib/libXmu.so
   • sudo ln -s /usr/lib/nvidia-current/libGL.so /usr/lib/libGL.so
6. Then go to the NVIDIA_GPU_COMPUTING_SDK_… folder. In the file C/common/common.mk change the line
   • LINKFLAGS +=
   • –>
   • LINKFLAGS += -L/usr/lib/nvidia-current
7. Add a following line at the end of /usr/local/cuda/bin/nvcc.profile
   • compiler-bindir=/usr/bin/gcc44
8. Make GPU computing SDK
   • cd NVIDIA_GPU_COMPUTING_SDK_…
   • make -j4 -i
9. Set up $PATH and $LD_LIBRARY_PATH. Add the followings ~/.bashrc.
   • export CUDA_HOME=/usr/local/cuda
     export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$CUDA_HOME/lib
     export PATH=$CUDA_HOME/bin:$PATH

Enjoy!