NVIDIA driver causes kernel freeze

[Basil Chupin]

On 26/08/2010 14:59, Thomas Olsen wrote:
> On Thursday 26 August 2010 03:51:40 Steve Morris wrote:
>
>    
>> Thomas just a thought that I should have woken up to earlier. If you are
>> using the nvidia binary driver from the ubuntu repositories, that driver
>> may be set up for a specific version kernel which is why the kernel
>> taint message (if this is the case then ubuntu have compiled their
>> kernels with module version compatibility turned off, because by default
>> if a kernel module has not been compiled for the version of the kernel
>> you are running the kernel will not load it).
>> In the repositories there is a dkms environment which will build kernel
>> modules from source files, there are nvidia packages in the repositories
>> that are designed to work with that environment, you might be better off
>> investigating those (this environment works like the drivers you
>> download from nvidia themselves that compile against the active kernel
>> at install time). The dkms environment requires you to have the kernel
>> header package installed as well, but the advantage with this
>> environment is that because the module is compiled against the kernel
>> headers it can be guaranteed to be version compatible with the kernel,
>> plus when you upgrade kernels the nvidia module will be automatically
>> compiled against the new kernel (assuming you upgrade the headers at the
>> same time) at kernel upgrade time or on the first boot of ubuntu from
>> the new kernel.
>>      
> It sounds reasonable but I think that the kernel modules was actually being
> compiled in my installation attempts. It downloads some dkms stuff and compiles
> something (my memory fails me now but I think amongst others the initrd). I
> have no idea how dkms, kernel modules and X drivers work together.
>
> BTW: If you install the driver from the NVIDIA website how do you remove it
> again if needed? Ah, after reading back in the thread I can see that you use
> the Ubuntu supplied drivers so you probably wouldn't know...
>    

To remove the driver:

rmmod nvidia

but if you are installing a new version from nVidia it will tell you 
that a driver is already installed and it will be removed before the new 
is compiled.

BC


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