Yesterday I uninstalled the Nvidia 331-67 proprietary driver and
installed the YaST nvidia repo version of 331-67. Now I want to install
the kernel security update.
My question is will dkms and YaSt take care of reinstalling the driver?
In the past i have always just used the Hardway of installing the
driver. Never had a problem doing that. decided to try the repo
approach to make it less work.
dkms is installed and seems to work for VirtualBox. At least the boot
messages show its running.
I don’t use nVidia now, but when I did, using the nvidia repo in Yast just worked. After the first install of the drivers, it always “just worked” after a kernel update. That’s one of the reasons I switched permanently to openSuse back then. In Fedora, the nvidia kernel module was never available right after a kernel update, so I had to do the hard way each time.
I guess one may never know until it’s tried the first time!
I don’t know if dkms will assist in maintaining the kernel’s video and you may not really know for sure if it’s helping to keep your VB Guest extensions installed until you update your kernel the first time.
If you run into unexpected results, post back here again so others can follow in your path.
>
> upscope;2645601 Wrote:
>>
>>
>> My question is will dkms and YaSt take care of reinstalling the
>> driver?
>>
>
> I don’t use nVidia now, but when I did, using the nvidia repo in
Yast
> just worked. After the first install of the drivers, it always “just
> worked” after a kernel update. That’s one of the reasons I switched
> permanently to openSuse back then. In Fedora, the nvidia kernel
module
> was never available right after a kernel update, so I had to do the
> hard way each time.
>
Yes that’s the reason I wanted to change. I try it later today.
Thanks for the response.
>
> upscope;2645601 Wrote:
>> Yesterday I uninstalled the Nvidia 331-67 proprietary driver and
>> installed the YaST nvidia repo version of 331-67. Now I want to
>> install the kernel security update.
>>
>> My question is will dkms and YaSt take care of reinstalling the
>> driver?
>
> In the past, I have installed the hard way.
>
> I recently did a test install to an external drive, mostly to test
> LXQt.
>
> I decided to try installing nvidia (304.119) from repos.
>
> That worked fine. Then I updated the kernel. Graphics still
worked,
> and was still using nvidia drivers.
>
> I just checked, and “dkms” is not installed.
>
Interesting. I will try later. I know dkms is installed, just verified
with YaST. I am going to install 13.2 in the next couple of weeks,
will test without dkms.
Thinking about this,
I don’t know that dkms is required to support video drivers because nowadays current drivers are supposed to be built as pluggable updates to a standard kernel API (ie kernel mode drivers. User mode drivers still are installed the old way without using the kernel API).
For that reason, any driver that uses the new architecture should “just work” if written properly. I don’t remember when kernel mode first appeared but it has gained rapid and widespread adoption especially within the past year and a half or so.
Without researching much about dkms however, it’s my impression that it assists in maintaining drivers which don’t use a standard API which is typical for instance of virtualization guest extensions. When dkms is installed and configured properly, you shouldn’t have to re-install Guest extensions every time the kernel is updated/upgraded.