[elrepo] nvidia driver works for me

[Nicolas Thierry-Mieg]

Dag Wieers wrote:
> On Mon, 21 Sep 2009, Phil Perry wrote:
> 
>> Nicolas Thierry-Mieg wrote:
>>
>>> 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).
> 
> Hi Nicolas,
> 
> Nice to get more feedback, especially from people we know and trust ;-)
> 
> I didn't know about this nv/nvidia config rewrite issue. I wonder if it 
> could be related to a postun/post script mix-up when doing an update ? At 
> least, that's how I interpreted the "at the same time".

Hello and thanks!

I should have been more precise, here's what I meant.
I used synaptic. I marked the rf packages for removal and the elrepo 
ones for installation, and only then pressed "Apply". So, the install 
and uninstall happened in a single apt "transaction" (as in 
/var/log/apt.log).
I guess the problem is that synaptic called the postinstall script of 
elrepo's rpm before calling the preuninstall of the rf rpm, so I ended 
up with nv instead of nvidia.

Actually I don't think this can happen with apt-get or yum, since AFAIK 
you can't provide two instructions (remove and install) in a single yum 
or apt-get command. I don't know about yum front-ends though.

So since most people probably use yum, it's even less of an issue than I 
thought.


> As Phil indicated, we know about an incompatibility between the kernel 
> module and the Xorg driver, if the kernel module is not unloaded/reloaded, 
> restarting Xorg (with the new driver) will fail. I think it failed with a 
> segmentation fault, I already regret not having reported it ! :-(
> 
> That is why the advise for rebooting, unloading the module is not possible 
> when in X. And the whole init 3; rmmod ...; init 5 dance is probably 
> wasted on most people.
> 
> Even though I personally hate to recommend rebooting...

yeah, in this case recommending a reboot is totally justified. This is 
all intended mainly for desktops anyways, so dropping to runlevel 3 will 
kill most of what the user was doing, it's not much better than a reboot.

Regards,
Nicolas