[elrepo] NVIDIA + SL6.3/Xorg issue; was: Re: NVIDIA and RHEL 6.5 issue

[Dirk Hoffmann]

Dear experts,

I am sorry to hijack your discussion, but you may have a useful opinion on my 
problem as well. I went into a rather big crisis with my Scientific Linux 6.3 
(rather similar to RHEL 6.3, as far as I beleive, and compatible 
with elrepo) installation.

After a fresh installation, I had updated all packages and then installed 
kmod-nvidia-96xx, which comes via depencency with nvidia-x11-drv-96xx drivers. 
The X server (xorg-1.13) refused to start due to the ABI13 used, and the 96xx 
drivers being stuck at ABI10. This seems to be the present state of these 
legacy drivers since a couple of years. (I can dig out references again, if 
needed.) A clever guy provided a patch for 3.x kernels, as NVIDIA only 
provides code working with 2.x (due to a bug in version checking). But no 
improvement for the ABI in sight.

Worse, I tried to "yum history undo" my installation of the 96xx drivers, 
hoping to come back to the previous situation. The X server started, but the 
graphical display became "scrambled" after a while (with some vertical, 
randomly changing bars, as if the video memory were overridden by some other 
process). Finally the system was totally stuck (no reaction to any key, except 
reset/power).

That is annoying (needed complete reinstall) and since I am using RH/yum many 
years ago, it is also the first time that a "yum undo" does not work. And it 
is the first time I install a package that finally tells me at runtime that 
some dependencies are not fulfilled. To start, you should probably flag the 
96xx packages with a requirement for the old ABI (i.e. Xorg server <= 1.10.x).

In case anybody has useful instructions how to adapt an existing driver to a 
new Xorg ABI, I would also be interested. But I am afraid I will not find that 
kind of expertise in this forum. Any pointers appreciated ; the x.org site has 
not been very helpful for me.

Thanks for reading until here.
 								Dirk Hoffmann