Re: occult nvidia kernel version skew

[hendrik@topoi.pooq.com]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2006 at 10:45:33AM -0400, Andrew Schulman wrote:
> > 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}

I take it this is the same as

  mv nvidia.o 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.

No.  I nvidiafb is not installed.  However, there is a file

/lib/modules/2.6.15-1-amd64-generic/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia/nvidiafb.ko

with a relatively old date.  It probably shouldn't be there.  Left 
over from a previous install, maybe?

Is there any way of finding out which installed package a file is part 
of?

Given the number of things that I've encountered that shouldn't be 
there in the past month, it might even be worth having an automated 
process look through the entire file system looking for things that 
are there but not part of any package (file trees like /tmp and /home 
exempted, of course.)  Of course there will be some legitimate files 
there, too, especially in /etc, but such a list might still be useful.

-- hendrik