[elrepo] nvidia driver works for me

[Phil Perry]

Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> New to the list but I've been a happy elrepo user for a while now. 
> Thanks for this nice repo!
> 
> I recently migrated 2 centos 5 x86_64 systems from the rpmforge dkms 
> nvidia packages, to the elrepo kmod ones currently in testing:
> nvidia-x11-drv-185.18.36-2.el5.elrepo.x86_64
> kmod-nvidia-185.18.36-2.el5.elrepo.x86_64
> 
> They work fine AFAICT.

Great - thanks for the feedback, we really appreciate it. The main 
reasons they're still in testing (rather than the main repo) is a) 
they've not been tested by that many people, and b) we'd really like to 
be sure updating works without issue before we push these out to the 
main repo, given how widely used they may be.

> The weak-update stuff worked well when installing kernel 2.6.18-164.
> 

Yeah, we were surprised by that. kABI breakage does occur and we thought 
nvidia would be one of the packages most likely affected so it was a 
pleasant surprise when testing to find it worked perfectly with 5.4 
series kernels.

> The only issue I had is that after installation my xorg.conf used the nv 
> driver instead of nvidia. I suspect this is because I uninstalled the 
> rpmforge packages and installed the elrepo ones at the same time, and 
> the scripts didn't get called in the right order. I don't know if you 
> can do anything about it, and it's not a big problem anyways.
> 

Our package uses the same scripts and tools for installing the driver in 
xorg.conf as the rpmforge dkms package. The uninstall script of both 
packages will set xorg.conf back to the default 'nv' xorg driver. One 
issue I've noted is the module stays loaded in memory even after a 
package is uninstalled, so the most reliable way is probably to perform 
a reboot between each uninstall/install step just to be sure (or rmmod 
them).