(Update) Re: -nvidia upgrade issues

[Mike Rooney]

On Fri, Nov 6, 2009 at 4:21 PM, Bryce Harrington <bryce at canonical.com> wrote:
> The two worst bugs are fixed, and the other two are at least understood
> now but I could use a bit more advice.  It seems there is a weird race
> condition with DKMS/upstart/nvidia which has cropped up because due to
> faster boot, that looks tricky to get sorted, so feedback from people
> with experience in DKMS/upstart matters would be helpful.
>
> From what I understand, when doing an upgrade it installs both nvidia
> and a new kernel (2.6.31).  At that point nvidia.ko is built against the
> *old* kernel (2.6.28).  Fine, a nvidia.ko was successfully built so
> installation completes without error.  xorg.conf is updated and the
> system is ready to run nvidia.  Or so it thinks.
>
> Now the user reboots.
>
> During boot, dpkg notes that it needs to build a new nvidia.ko for
> 2.6.31 and dutifully gets to work.  Meanwhile, since X is being started
> early on in the boot cycle, it in fact starts up before dkms has
> finished building the new nvidia.ko.  X starts booting nvidia but since
> there is not yet an nvidia.ko for the current kernel it exits with an
> error.

Chiming in as a user of -nvidia here, I just wanted to share my
upgrade experience here as a data point. Indeed nvidia does build
against the old kernel which seemed a little silly to me, but harmless
as I understand it. However I didn't have any issues on reboot. Maybe
it is just a race condition; to the very best of my memory, on a
reboot it built for .31 just fine and continued on. I had literally
zero problems anywhere with my dist upgrade. Though, I may have been
using one of the 9.04 X PPAs, if that is worth anything. Sorry if this
wasn't a useful data point :)

-- 
Michael Rooney
mrooney at ubuntu.com