[elrepo] Announcement: EL7 Updated kmod-nvidia package for RHEL7.6

[Manuel Wolfshant]

On 11/19/2018 09:57 PM, Frank Thommen wrote:
> On 11/19/2018 11:41 AM, John Hodrien wrote:
>> On Sun, 18 Nov 2018, Phil Perry wrote:
>>
>>> In the future I may deprecate/remove this feature so the plugin will 
>>> only work (correctly) if all kernels are available, but I'd like 
>>> some discussion about how best to handle this. I believe option (1) 
>>> is more robust than any fudge / workaround I can implement and will 
>>> allow the plugin to work seamlessly going forward, including on 
>>> unsupported setups where people have stayed on older point releases. 
>>> It doesn't matter whether we are talking now, transitioning from 
>>> el7.5 to el7.6, or 6-12 months from now transitioning from el7.6 to 
>>> el7.7, or for someone who for whatever reason has stayed on el7.4 
>>> (or whatever point release). The plugin should just work in all 
>>> scenarios as long as all kernels are available to yum (in reality it 
>>> doesn't even need to be all kernels, just the base kernel from each 
>>> point release).
>>
>> Personally I'd ignore the use case of people staying on old point 
>> releases of
>> CentOS.  This isn't a supported setup, and I think you should treat 
>> it the
>> same way.
>
> But this also means ignoring reality, as there can be very good 
> reasons not to update (or to update with considerable delay). E.g. we 
> run a big HPC cluster based on CentOS and we /cannot/ update due to 
> drivers for special hardware (Infiniband) which usually is one or two 
> point releases behind.

     I am not a fan of using old packages , especially when they are 
known to have (security) flaws that were fixed in newer versions but I 
can understand your situation, especially as I also met it several times 
in the past. The only reliable solution in this case is to not rely on 
public repositories (which are fully out of your control) but use 
instead your own local repository with vetted packages. Include in this 
local repo both the old and unsupported CentOS packages ( it's public 
knowledge that in CentOS we do not support anything but the latest minor 
release of any major release ) and the elrepo packages that you need.

     As an example, for a while I maintained in my local C6 repo the old 
( and unsupported by AMD ) kmod-fglrx-legacy packages that were 
compatible with some older ATI chipsets. We still had in use computers 
with those graphics chips and for reasons I will not detail here we were 
not satisfied with the driver included in the distro. The solution I 
used was to pin an old Xorg version ( the bump between CentOS 6.3 and 
6.4 made the binary blobs provided by AMD incompatible with the newer 
Xorg ) and rebuild (when needed) the kmod-fglrx-legacy src rpms against 
the new kernels. All needed packages were therefore stored in a local 
custom repo and overrode the default distro packages.


         wolfy