Fedora 7 - RPM Build Nvidia 9755 [revisited]

[Jonathan Berry]

On 4/8/07, Gene Heskett <gene.heskett at verizon.net> wrote:
> As you know, I test kernels for a hobby, and one of the biggest PITA's
> ever is continually re-installing the nvidia driver since my kernel
> maker/installer script copies everything already installed from that
> version in /boot and /lib/modules to a .old version in case things go
> aglay.  Its an easy revert that way if they do.  But that also means I
> have to re-install the thing everytime I build a new kernel.  Or for some
> reason reboot to a known good kernel that's already had it installed
> once, but nvidia in their paranoia somehow manages to kill it if a
> different kernel has been booted since that one was.

Gene,
The nvidia installer has an option to it that will allow you just to
compile the kernel module, rather than install the whole driver all
over again (which will blow away all other kernel modules).  You can
also specify a kernel version for which to build if you wish to
install it for a kernel other than the currently running version.  -k
and -K <version>, I believe, are the options.  Run the nvidia*.sh
script with --help for more details (or there may be another with more
detailed help, can't remember, I think --help should tell you).  As
long as you do not upgrade versions of the driver, you can just
install the kernel module this way and run multiple kernels.

Jonathan