Hi there,
I’ve been having a repeating problem, anytime I update something ‘major’ with opensuse updater. This could be either a kernel update, or anything that remotely has to do with video or display. Anyways, the next time I go to log in, I can’t start X. This basically always happens. Restring my xorg.conf files does nothing, the only way I know to fix it is to reinstall the nvidia card driver. This always works, but is a pain, so I’m wondering why I always have to do this. Thanks!!
You have to do this because the proprietary NVIDIA/ATI drivers have to be compiled against whatever kernel they are going to be running with. This means that whenever a kernel update comes through, the drivers need to be reinstalled so they can be recompiled against the newer kernel.
It is impossible to have the kernel update itself recompile them b/c they are not part of the kernel to begin with; they must be installed from a separate package. This is true of nearly all Linux distributions.
I think Ubuntu has something called dkms that attempts to preserve already compiled proprietary drivers between kernel updates, but I’ve personally never seen it working as it should. Keep in mind I haven’t used Ubuntu in a year, so I imagine its gotten better.
I have nvidia drivers but somehow this is not happening to me.
The trick on Ubuntu is more often not working or not working properly than 100% ok.
It should be possible to create a script, that recognizes a kernel change, changes runlevel to 3 and reinstall the driver, changes back to runlevel 5. That should do the job.
> I have nvidia drivers but somehow this is not happening to me.
nor to me…i do not know how or why, but using the openSUSE Updater
to install the few-days-ago kernel update, i watched while it flashed
to the info box that it downloaded the new kernel source, compiled and
installed the driver…all hands off…
sweet!!
i’m still on version 10.3, maybe that has something to do with it…i
do not know, but if it was available in 10.3 you would hope that it
could be done like magic (hands-off) in later releases, huh?
–
natural_pilot
I am not using the ATI proprietary drivers and I am also having a problem with the latest kernel update 2.6.27.23-0.1.1 making my video performance horrible. It will not even support video playback. I downgraded back to 2.6.27.21-0.1.2 which fully reversed the issue. Some distro’s are reporting problems with the kernel mode-setting which is designed to allow a smother startup among other things creating 2d and 3d performance problems. Ubuntu and Fedora forums mention disabling it to fix the problem. I was wondering if this was enabled during the last kernel update but I don’t have time to look into it at the moment so I am just staying with 2.6.27.21-0.1.2 for the time being. You may want to check and see if this is enabled and disable it to see if that helps.
If you use the rpm’s in the Nvidia repos you won’t have to recompile everytime a kernel upgrade comes. If you do compile your driver and kernel, it will need to be built against any kernel upgrades everytime.
As the Nvidia directions HERE say:
It is recommended to use YaST for installation of the NVIDIA
driver. There are several reasons for this. First, it’s
simple. Second, and this is the most important one, you won’t need to
recompile the nvidia kernel module after a kernel update.
This applies to all the NVIDIA compiled drivers/kernels (I just used this as the example because it’s what my Nvidia card uses).
Take Care,
Ian