[elrepo] NVIDIA RPMs

[Phil Perry]

On 31/03/2019 03:57, warron.french wrote:
> I have downloaded the SRC RPMs associated with Nvidia drivers 418.43 and 
> 418.56.
> 
> Extracting the kmod-nvidia SRC RPM and reviewing the SPEC file exposes 
> the fact that the kversion apparently is pointing at 3.10.0-957.
> 
> Can I legally or technically change this value instead to 
> "3.10.0-957*.10.1*" since that is the release of kernel upon which my 
> systems that I support are running?
> 

Yes, you can build the package against any kernel you like.

Red Hat maintains a stable kernel ABI in RHEL, and elrepo's kmod 
packages take advantage of that. This means that we are able to build 
our kmod packages against the initial RHEL7.6 release kernel 
(kernel-3.10.0-957) and as long as none of the kernel symbols used by 
the nvidia kernel modules change, the package should work seamlessly 
across kernel updates. This means we (you) do not need to rebuild the 
kernel driver for each and every kernel update, as you would on fedora, 
for example.

So assuming Red Hat haven't changed the kABI, you can rebuild against 
any RHEL7.6 series kernel and it should work with any kernel in the 
rhel7.6 series (any 3.10.0-957.* kernel).

> Using the RPMs rpmbuilt with these SRC RPMs does not render a useful 
> video driver set.  Yes, they do install; however, upon reboot I know 
> longer have GUI (GDM, KDE, etc..) and then I am forced to backout these 
> changes.
> 
> Can I get some corrective guidance or confirmation on this issue and my 
> suggested approach please?
> 
> 

I see no reason for that, so maybe it's something related to your build 
system. Maybe you can share your build logs on a pastebin?