[elrepo] RE driver update incompatibility issue

[Phil Perry]

On 30/01/13 13:05, Phil Perry wrote:
>
> So, to this end, what _can_ we do?
>
> I'm more than willing to reconsider / revisit the idea of echoing a
> warning to the console upon package installation/updating that will warn
> a user if the version being installed/updated does not support the
> detected hardware. This might look something like this:
>
> WARNING: This version of the NVIDIA driver does not support the detected
> hardware.
> Please uninstall this driver and install the kmod-nvidia-304xx legacy
> driver
> Please visit: http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia-304xx
>
> Secondly, we could package and make available the script / program that
> detects the nvidia hardware and advises users on the correct driver
> installation - that would be easy as we'd need to write / develop such a
> script for use above. Then if users are unsure which driver they need
> they can run the script to find out before downloading and installing a
> large nvidia package.
>
> Of course what none of this does is prevent the scenario where a user of
> older 6xxx/7xxx hardware updates from version 304 to version 310 (or
> above), although the console warning may help.
>
> And as always, we welcome other suggestions.
>

Replying to my own post to keep suggestions grouped together:

This suggestion would solve the issue of yum updating to a new version 
of the nvidia driver than no longer supports the installed hardware.

We could create a set of dummy packages specific for hardware classes. 
For example,

nvidia-6xxx
nvidia-7xxx
...
etc

and then somehow figure out a way to get the correct hardware-specific 
dummy package onto users systems (that's the tricky part).

The logic then being that when the v310 driver was released and dropped 
support for 6xxx and 7xxx series cards, we could have added a Conflicts 
against those packages, so if users had one of those packages installed 
specific to their hardware then that would prevent yum automatically 
updating the nvidia driver to a version no longer supported by the 
installed hardware.

In terms of Provides and Requires, it could be as simple as each of the 
above hardware-specific dummy packages contains a virtual Provides for 
nvidia-hardware-compat, and the latest nvidia driver Requires 
nvidia-hardware-compat and Conflicts with the hardware-specific 
individual packages that are no longer supported. Again, the tricky part 
is getting the right hardware-specific dummy package installed on an 
end-user system.