[luau] NVIDIA driver and kernel upgrades

[Warren Togami]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Brandon Jasper" <dragonw at hawaii.rr.com>
To: "LUAU" <luau at videl.ics.hawaii.edu>
Sent: Sunday, November 17, 2002 3:24 PM
Subject: [luau] NVIDIA driver and kernel upgrades


> I don't know how many of you have heard about the vulnerability in the
> redhat kernel but as usual they have put out a fix in a very timely
> manner... Unlike some other corporations *cough* M$ *cough*. Anyway, I let
> the redhat network update my kernel and booted it... To my surprise X
didn't
> work, until I realized that I had compiled the NVIDIA kernel drivers for
the
> old kernel and smacked myself on the head for not thinking of it sooner (I
> had a long night ok? :P).  The moral of the email is... If you install a
new
> kernel version and are using an NVIDIA card... You need to recompile the
> drivers which is why you should download the src rpms rather than the
> precompiled ones and use the 'rpmbuild --rebuild --recompile' command on
> them which will put the rpms in /usr/src/redhat/RPMS/i386/ directory so
you
> can install them as usual.
>

When you do kernel updates, you should always use rpm -ivh which will
install an additional kernel and automatically put it into your GRUB boot
menu.  I think up2date does this automatically too.  This allows you to boot
back in the old kernel just in case the new kernel is a disaster.

This should be common practice for updating kernels in any Linux
distribution.  Always install additional kernels, and do not delete old
kernels until you are SURE the new kernel works properly.

I updated a friend's system yesterday from 2.4.18-17.8.0 to 2.4.18-18.8.0
and I needed to re-install the nVidia kernel modules.  I kept around the
NVIDIA_kernel*.src.rpm module so it was a snap.  Unfortunately you do have
to download the nearly 30MB kernel-source*.src.rpm package but that isn't
too bad for broadband people.