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

[Phil Perry]

On 03/12/13 22:24, Dirk Hoffmann wrote:
>
> Dear experts,
>

Hi Dirk,

> 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).
>

Already done in the following commit:

https://github.com/elrepo/packages/commit/ce4e9581cdf55fd9263c86583b4aad61f0699c98

The next release will have a versioned dependency for 
xorg-x11-server-Xorg to ensure compatibility. Apologies this was not in 
place before - we didn't anticipated this issue before the release of 6.4.

> 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.
>

Unfortunately, even if we had the knowledge, hacking the existing nvidia 
driver would not be possible as the license does not permit the code to 
be modified. Any changes MUST come from nvidia themselves.

> Thanks for reading until here.
>                                  Dirk Hoffmann