I’ve bought an old Geforce card to be put into a ‘server’, only for the purpose of using it for BOINC and GPGPU-apps. It’s a box in a coloc, it won’t always have monitor attached, not even after reboots – usual stuff. What I’ve found is the following:
– When X is started up with the nvidia driver (no matter which version it is after 195.xx), it always does a scan whether a monitor is attached. If it isn’t, it plain dies.
– UseDisplayDevice “none” can be set to ignore the monitor scan.
– … but this is only available on Quadro / Tesla cards, not for the off-the-shelf Geforce cards.
I understand that the point is that if someone wants to build a box for GPGPU-calcs, the Quadro/Tesla (mostly the latter) is the card for this audience. Even so, a soft ‘anyadat’ has left me.
It’s not the type of issue that I wouldn’t be able to solve, it’s a friendly colo, monitor can be attached if required, or even an IP console. But guys, this is plain screwing the users…