nvidia driver breaks with pretty much every F8 update
Claude Jones
cjones at levitjames.com
Tue Mar 25 13:13:18 UTC 2008
On Mon March 24 2008, David Kramer wrote:
> Also, I got disgusted with the fights between livna and atrpms a long
> time ago, and now I don't have a single livna package on my system.
>
> > The "solution" is to install the nvidia module manually from the nvidia
> > site download, which is not really a simple option.
>
> Ugh. And then recompile it with every kernel update, right?
there's a real easy solution to this - I use it on many, many, machines
freshrpms bundles a package called dkms with their version of the nVidia
driver: 'bundles' is not perhaps the correct word, but, dkms is installed as
well when you install the nVidia driver from freshrpms; freshrpms makes no
kernel-modules available at all; dkms is a script written by an active
participant in the Fedora project, who happens to work for Dell; the script,
after installation, runs at boot time and checks your nVidia kernel-module
against the kernel that's being booted - if the active kernel module doesn't
match the kernel that's being booted, it forks into a routine where it builds
a new kernel module on the fly -- once it's done, normal boot resumes and
when your machine comes up, it has the correct kernel-module built AND loaded
for the running kernel -- and that's why freshrpms makes no kernel-modules
available; with this system, you are completely automated - in several years
of using it, there was one hiccup where a new nVidia driver came out and the
script wouldn't run properly, as I recall -- the result was, the machines
reverted to nv driver that comes with Fedora in all cases - I lost some of
the features of the nVidia video drivers, but the machines kept working,
otherwise
using this method, you certainly wouldn't end up with a kernel of one
architecture and a kernel-module of another, which is causing your present
issues, and you can forget about worrying about new kernel-modules after
every kernel update
--
Claude Jones
Brunswick, MD, USA
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