Re: occult nvidia kernel version skew

[Andrew Schulman <andrex@alumni.utexas.net>]

> hendrik@april:~$ ls -l -R /lib/modules/2.6.15-1-amd64-generic/ | grep 
> nvi
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root root    104 2006-06-14 08:30 nvidia
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    80 2006-05-16 18:14 nvidia
> /lib/modules/2.6.15-1-amd64-generic/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia:
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 73665 2006-03-20 06:07 nvidiafb.ko
> /lib/modules/2.6.15-1-amd64-generic/nvidia:
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7404627 2006-05-18 09:43 nvidia.ko
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7411782 2006-06-14 03:59 nvidia.o
> hendrik@april:~$
> hendrik@april:~$ ls -l -R /lib/modules/2.6.12-1-amd64-generic/ | grep 
> nvi
> drwxr-xr-x  2 root root     80 2006-06-07 06:16 nvidia
> drwxr-xr-x 2 root root    80 2006-02-19 10:56 nvidia
> /lib/modules/2.6.12-1-amd64-generic/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia:
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 74359 2005-09-27 22:13 nvidiafb.ko
> /lib/modules/2.6.12-1-amd64-generic/nvidia:
> -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 7419527 2006-06-07 06:13 nvidia.ko
> hendrik@april:~$
> 
> The 2.6.15 has an extra nvidia.o -- one whose date is quite recently, 
> probably from when I was installing the 8762 version.  Would that one be 
> the trouble?  What do the .ko and .o suffixes mean in this context, 
> anyway?

By my limited knowledge of such things, a .o is just a piece of object code,
while a .ko file is a kernel module, which can be just a renamed .o file, or
have other content as well.

I don't know what that nvidia.o file is doing there, but I doubt that you
need it.  I don't have one on my host.  Moreover, I've seen one report in
the past that a stray nvidia.o file caused the nvidia driver to break. There
wouldn't be any harm in running

mv nvidia.o{,.hold}

and then shutting down X, removing and reinserting the nvidia module, and
restarting X.

You don't have the nvidiafb module inserted, do you?  It conflicts with
nvidia.