Qualification of Maya 7.0 on Linux

Last Updated: June.20, 2006

Update in progress - check back soon for more up to date information

Contents of this document

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

General Configuration

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

As well, you must meet other requirements such as:

• a three button mouse
• an Ethernet network card, or hardware dongle (for product licensing). Customers intending to license their Alias software based on an external network card should be aware that Alias does not support the use of these devices and cannot guarantee that software will operate correctly when licensed in this way.
• at least 512 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 Alias 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 Maya successfully on earlier or later drivers, Alias cannot guarantee their performance or behavior.
• 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.
• All dual monitor setups have problems with window positioning: windows/menus not displaying on the second monitor, flipping back to the main monitor, etc. Dual monitor use is therefore not recommended or supported at this time.
• 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

Operating System

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. These combinations were previously described in a way that could be misinterpreted and we apologize for any inconvenience.

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

• Systems marked "Qualified" have been tested by Alias and have been found to operate as described.
• Systems marked "Untested" or "Unsupported" have not been tested by Alias.
• Systems marked "Not Qualified" are not considered suitable for use with Maya.
• It may be possible to successfully use Maya on Untested, Unsupported or Not Qualified systems, but support and maintenance programs will be subject to the Alias Support services guidelines.

32-bit processors, and 64-bit processors running in 32-bit mode

64-bit processors

¹ Maya 7.0 has been qualified and is fully supported on the following Workstations with one of these operating systems:

• Red Hat Enterprise WS 4 U1 x86 (RHEL WS 4 U1)
• SuSE 9.3 x86
• Fedora Core 3 x86

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 Alias 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 Alias 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 configuration choices, but are only the important components that we are aware significantly affect Maya.

Redhat Enterprise Linux ws 4.0

• xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.EL.13.6
• 2.6.9-11.EL kernel
• glibc i686 version (2.3.4-2.9)

SuSE 9.3

• xorg-x11-6.8.2-30
• kernel-smp-2.6.11.4-21.9
• glibc-2.3.4-23.4

Fedora Core 3

• xorg-x11-6.8.2-1.FC3.45.2
• kernel-2.6.9-1.667
• glibc 2.3.6-0.FC3.1

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

² Maya 7.0 is currently Unsupported on these systems. Alias is investigating many of these combinations, but cannot currently support them.

Important Linux Notes

OpenMotif 2.2.3
Maya 7.0 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 libGLU.so
Maya depends on a compatible version of libGLU.so. The version that comes with XFree86 is compatible and works with Maya. Some other versions have problems with exception handling within Maya.

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 can not 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.

Sound

Alias 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, and we are currently attempting to identify specific sound cards that provide better performance.

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.

ALSA

ALSA stands for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture.  It is a complete replacement for the existing sound architecture in Linux. It is geared toward high performance applications and is better suited to SMP machines.  It has emulation for the older OSS sound system that is standard in Red Hat Linux. Maya uses the OSS compatibility layer. If you are experiencing sound problems under Linux, we recommend installing ALSA drivers.

For more information, see http://www.alsa-project.org/ .

Notes on Operating Systems

Workstations

Graphics Cards and Driver Versions

Maya is qualified with the following graphics adapters (with the specified driver for the specified operating systems). Alias has tested only drivers listed under each OS. While it may be possible to use Maya successfully on earlier or later drivers, Alias 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.

Video Cards without Hardware Overlay Planes
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 4 and Quadro FX Family
To set hardware overlay planes on NVIDIA quadro cards you will need to enable "CIOverlay" in the XF86Config file. ex.

Section "Device"

Option "CIOverlay" "on"

Detailed Driver Notes and Settings

ATI FireGL X1/Z1

Model	Version	Driver Settings
ATI FireGL X1/Z1	Red Hat Linux : 8.8.25	Application Profile->Maya
Limitations and Solutions
Limitation	Shaders using HardwareTexturing-> TextureFilter-> MipmapNearest, MipmapLinear, MipmapBilinear or MipmapTrilinear, will display incorrectly in the Hardware Render Buffer.
Solution	Set TextureFilter to either Nearest(Unfiltered) or Bilinear, per shader

Compiler Requirements

Maya 7.0 was compiled using gcc 3.3.4 on a Redhat 9.0 system. gcc 3.3.4 source code is available from http://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-3.3

The options to build the gcc 3.3.4 compiler used for Maya are:

        gcc334 -v

        Reading specs from /opt/gcc334/lib/gcc-lib/i686-pc-linux-gnu/3.3.4/specs
        Configured with: ../gcc-3.3.4/configure 
        --prefix=/opt/gcc334 
        --program-suffix=334 
        --enable-shared 
        --enable-threads=posix 
        --disable-checking 
        --with-system-zlib 
        --disable-libunwind-exceptions 
        --enable-__cxa_atexit
        Thread model: posix
        gcc version 3.3.4

Plugin developers should use the same configuration.