Some updates on the NVIDIA driver in Intrepid and Hardy…

First of all, happy release to you all.

I have noticed that NVIDIA released two beta drivers which work with Intrepid’s X.org and I will make new packages available in the -proposed archives ASAP. In the meantime you might want to see why I recommend you to wait for these packages. Keep an eye this bug report so as to know when these packages are available for testing.

As regards Hardy, I need a plan to backport driver 177 from Intrepid without breaking dist-upgrades and/or the available drivers. I should also update the fglrx driver in my lrm-envy.

Stay tuned.

9 thoughts on “Some updates on the NVIDIA driver in Intrepid and Hardy…

  1. Hey,

    Not sure if you’re aware of this not, but a patch needs to be made to the sources of the NVIDIA driver kernel interface. It’s not critical for pre-Jaunty, but AFAIK, NVIDIA hasn’t fixed the issue in their source drops yet.

    Please see http://www.trausch.us/2008/10/25/nvidia-17780-linux-2628/ for information. I haven’t gone over the patch linked in the first comment, but the net result is that the drivers should be made to compile cleanly both with 2.6.28+ kernels (which will be used in Jaunty) and pre-2.6.28 kernels which are used in Intrepid and prior. The core fix involves removing an assumption that a particular kernel-level macro will always remain a macro, and the rest is just that headers will be moving around in 2.6.28. Simply having the fix will make it so that DKMS in Intrepid will succeed in rebuilding the module without any user-effort if they want to do something like run a 2.6.28 kernel on Intrepid. (There are some valid reasons for running in such an unsupported configuration, of course; I am just hoping that it’ll be made easier.)

  2. Michael: thanks for reporting the problem. With DKMS I can make sure that the patch is applied only if kernel >= 2.6.28 without breaking anything for users running kernel 2.6.27.

  3. After last night’s whole sale update, all above mentioned drivers (177 etc) appeared in packet manager, and regular install steps worked without any extra intervention. Demanding OpenGL applications (X-Plane is my case in point) works now.

  4. Is one of these beta drivers going to be 180.60?
    I am trying to get cuda to work, however I don’t want to install another driver. (Too much trouble in the past…)

  5. hi alberto (i have that name too, is my second name), i wirte to ask when is going out the backport of the 177 driver for hardy… and send you a congrats, for you excelent work!

    thank!

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