Updating NVIDIA Drivers on Solaris 11.1
I recently spent the better part of a weekend trying to figure out how to update the NVIDIA graphics drivers for Solaris 11.1 on my Lenovo T530. It uses NVIDIA's NVS 5400M GPU. Prior to doing any of this, I had to configure the BIOS to use "Discrete Graphics" instead of the default, "NVIDIA Optimus". Once I had done that, I then did the following on a clean install of Solaris 11.1 to update the drivers. The NVIDIA drivers that are included with Solaris 11.1 are relatively old and did not support the NVS 5400M card I had in my laptop.
Directions for updating NVIDIA Drivers on Solaris 11.1
All of the commands below should be run as root.
beadm create solaris-nvidia
beadm mount solaris-nvidia /mnt
pkg -R /mnt uninstall driver/graphics/nvidia
/bin/sh NVIDIA-Solaris-x86-XXX.XX.run --extract-only
cd NVIDIA-Solaris-x86-XXX.XX
pkgadd -R /mnt -d . NVDAgraphics NVDAgraphicsr
bootadm update-archive -R /mnt
beadm activate solaris-nvidia
reboot -p
You should now be in an environment with the updated NVIDIA drivers; verify a correct installation by running the following (as root)
nvidia-config --query-gpu-info
It should spew out a bunch of detailed information about your video card, if it doesn't, you did something wrong (check the BIOS Settings on a Lenovo T530, see above).
Then, run this to generate the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file
nvidia-xconfig
Update the X server to tell it to use /etc/X11/xorg.conf
svccfg -s svc:/application/x11/x11-server setprop options/config_file=xorg.conf
reboot
References
http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+x_win/NvidiaInstallation
http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26502_01/html/E28056/gmcdj.html