Qualification of Maya 2008 on Linux

Last updated: May 12th, 2008

Contents of this document

• General Configuration
• Operating System
• Important Linux Notes
• Notes on Operating Systems
• Graphics Cards & Driver Versions
• Sound
• Notes on Operating Systems
• Detailed Driver Notes and Settings
• Compiler Requirements
• Python Version

General Configuration

In order to determine whether your system is qualified to run Autodesk Maya 2008 and mental ray for Maya, you must have a qualified processor, operating system, graphics card, and graphics driver. See the following sections.

In addition, other requirements are as follows:

• A three button mouse.
• An ethernet network card, or hardware dongle (for product licensing). Customers intending to license their Autodesk software based on an external network card should be aware that Autodesk does not support the use of these devices and cannot guarantee that software will operate correctly when licensed in this way.
• At least 1024 MB of RAM (more is recommended).

General disclaimers:

• The configurations shown are subject to change, and additional qualified configurations may be added after qualification testing has been carried out.
• It may be possible to successfully use Maya with a non-qualified or partially qualified configuration, but support and maintenance programs will be subject to the Autodesk Support services guidelines.
• The graphics drivers specified in this table are the drivers that were used for the qualification process. While it may be possible to use Autodesk Maya successfully on earlier or later drivers, Autodesk cannot guarantee their performance or behavior.

Operating Systems and processors

Intel and AMD 64-bit Compatibility: Please note that qualification on 64-bit capable systems must take into account the mode that the CPU is running as well as whether the OS is 32-bit or 64-bit. 

The following tables show the operating systems and processor combinations qualified to run Autodesk Maya 2008 and mental ray for Maya.

• Operating Systems marked "Compatible" may work with Maya, but have not been tested or qualified on that distro and are not supported.
• Systems marked "Not Qualified" are not considered suitable for use with Maya.
• It may be possible to successfully use Autodesk Maya 2008 on Compatible, Unsupported or Not Qualified systems, but support and maintenance programs will be subject to Autodesk Support service guidelines.

* - Red Hat Enterprise Linux Workstation v4.0 (update 5)

** - Autodesk does not test installations on non-RPM linux distributions.

The Linux operating system is extremely flexible with regards to precise versioning of different components, drivers and libraries. Maya may behave very differently on superficially similar systems and while Autodesk will do our best to help solve problems that are probably due to operating system configuration issues, we may be unable to explain or determine the cause of a problem.

Internally at Autodesk we have stabilized on the following configurations. We provide this list for the purpose of aiding our customers, but we can make no guarantees to the reliability, stability or availability of these components. This is not a complete list of Linux configurations choices. This list includes important components that significantly affect Maya.

• Due to the many operating system and architecture differences between the supported platforms, the results of some operations will differ on different platforms. This is most noticeable with operations which iterate to reach their results -- leading to cumulatively large difference -- e.g., dynamics, some rendering. You may not be able to "mix and match" renderings on different platforms.
• We do not recommend saving data directly from Maya to NFS or other remote mounted file systems. We strongly recommend that you save the files locally and then copy the data to the mounted storage system
• When texture images are stored on systems remote from the rendering process, depending on network speed, specifications and load, it is possible that the renderer may be unable to access a texture file on demand and may 'drop' individual textures on a frame by frame basis. To reduce this occurrence store textures on a system local to the rendering process.
• Maya is not linked to be compatible with SELinux. If SELinux does not need to be enabled, don't enable it. The SELinux requirement may be addressed via two mechanisms after Maya has been installed:

  1) If you do not wish to use SELinux enforcement, you can disable it by running the `setenforce 0` command before starting X, or by adding selinux=0 to the end of the kernel line in /etc/grub.conf or change /etc/selinux/config and reboot.

  2) It may be possible to change the security context of the Maya libraries, with the chcon command.  This has not been tested.

• KDE klipper is known to have focusing issues with Maya, which may contribute to application instability. We recommend removing the applet from the panel and editing the config file, (~/.kde/share/config/klipperrcv), to disable KDE klipper.

   [$Version]
  update_info=klipperrc.upd:25082001,klipperrc.upd:kde3.1 ral]
  AutoStart=false

Qual chart update is in progress. The information contained in this chart is currently being updated.

Please see Notes on Operating Systems. note re: non Redhat Systems.

Important Linux Notes

OpenMotif 2.2.3

Maya 2008 uses OpenMotif 2.2.3 as its GUI framework. The version used is OpenMotif 2.2.3 from ICS with additional updates from the OpenMotif CVS. Maya includes the library in its default lib directory. No action is required to use the proper library.

For more information, see http://www.motifzone.com/

OpenGL Visuals

Maya's choice of OpenGL visuals is RGBA 8/8/8/8 double buffer with depth buffer of 24 where applicable. Visuals available from the XServer can be found using the command glxinfo.

If Maya cannot obtain its preferred visual, it will fall back as possible to lower values. A warning will be issued in this case.

Set up the XServer so it is using direct rendering to get as many visuals as possible. Use a depth setting of 24, to enable 8 bits per component.

Window Manager

Qualification tests listed in this page have been performed under KDE version 3.5.X.  Other window managers are likely to work just fine although they have not been tested and therefore they cannot be listed as "Qualified".

Autodesk is aware that sound reproduction inside Maya (scrubbing and playback) doesn't work on many sound cards on Linux. At this time sound reproduction may not be adequate for your purposes. Sound playback does behave correctly on some cards and some on-board/built-in sound devices.

Soundblaster Live cards are currently known to provide inadequate performance for interactive sound playback, particularly scrubbing.

We are also aware that sound will not work on some sounds cards (e.g. Soundblaster 16) when another application is already using the sound system.

Notes on Operating Systems

Graphics Cards and Driver Versions

Maya is qualified with the following graphics adapters (with the specified driver for the specified operating systems). Autodesk has tested only drivers listed under each OS. While it may be possible to use Maya successfully on earlier or later drivers, Autodesk cannot guarantee their performance or behavior. If you encounter problems with a driver, we strongly suggest that you contact the graphic card vendor to report your problem.

* This permutation was qualified on Maya 2008 Extension 2. Results can be seen by going to: http://download.autodesk.com/us/maya/qualcharts/Maya2008_Extension2_linux.html

There will be visual differences compared with Hardware overlays that may result in difficulty seeing or manipulating aspects of the scene or Maya interface. Examples of Graphics cards without Hardware overlays include (but are not restricted to):

• Radeon Family
• Geforce Series

Nvidia Quadro FX Family
To set hardware overlay planes on NVIDIA quadro cards you will need to enable "CIOverlay" in the 'xorg.conf file. ex.

Section "Device"

Option "CIOverlay" "on

Driver Notes and Caveats

Python

Maya 2008 for Linux uses Python 2.5.1 UCS4.

Compiler Requirements

Maya 2008 was compiled using gcc 4.1.2, on a RHEL 4 system. gcc 4.1.2 source code is available from http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-4.0/ .

The options to build the gcc 4.1.2. compiler used for Maya are:

gcc402 -v

Using built-in specs.
Target: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
Configured with: ../gcc-4.1.2/configure --prefix=/opt/gcc412 --program-suffix=412  --enable-shared  --enable-threads=posix  --enable-checking=release  --with-system-zlib  --enable-__cxa_atexit  --disable-libunwind-exceptions  --enable-languages=c,c++ Thread model: posix gcc version 4.1.2

Plugin developers should use the same configuration.