[ubuntu-x] (Update) Re: -nvidia upgrade issues

[Bryce Harrington]

On Fri, Nov 06, 2009 at 04:43:41PM -0800, Mike Rooney wrote:
> 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 :)

Yes, positive cases do help a lot.  There have been complaints on forums
about problems upgrading with nvidia installed, although little in the
way of solid facts.