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Re: occult nvidia kernel version skew



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

Removing that nvidia.o file hs had no impact at all in eliminating the 
version incompatibility.
> 
> You don't have the nvidiafb module inserted, do you?  It conflicts with
> nvidia.
> 

No I don't have nvidiafb inserted.

>

Guessing that my problems probably resulted from a faulty upgrade (and 
there was plenty of that in the xorg6.9->7.0 transition), my next step 
would seem to be to purge *all* nvidia-specific packages, remove their 
.debs from apt-cache, reconstruct the locate database, look for any 
remaining files with a reasonable facsimile of "nvidia" in their names 
and delete them, look for any stray files not part of any package and 
delete any that look suspicious, and then begin to install the stuff 
again from scratch, downloading .debs, compiling kernel modules, etc.

Anything else I should watch out for?

-- hendrik



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