[CentOS] dkms

Thu Mar 18 22:23:37 UTC 2010
Ned Slider <ned at unixmail.co.uk>

m.roth at 5-cent.us wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 18, 2010 at 12:56 PM,  <m.roth at 5-cent.us> wrote:
>>
>>>> ls -l `find /lib/modules -name nvidia.ko`
>>> How 'bout find /lib/modules -name nvidia.ko -ls?
>>> 30965907    0 lrwxrwxrwx   1 root     root           48 Mar 18 09:48
>>> /lib/modules/2.6.18-164.2.1.el5/weak-updates/nvidia.ko ->
> <snip>
>> It's a mess. :-(
> 
> That's after I did a yum remove of the 184 (I think it was).
>> You have missing symlinks (If you run the original command, you'd see
>> red-blinking lines). nvidia.ko built by dkms is still there, etc.
>>
>> If I were you, I would completely remove dkms and all nvidia.ko and
>> symlinks above. Then do a clean install of the kmod package (
>> http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia-173xx ).
> 
> Don't need that - I've got NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-173.14.20-pkg2.run from
> NVidia, I think, and I run that, and it rebuilds the drivers.
> 

The reason 2 people suggested you use the elrepo nvidia package(s) is so 
you don't have to rebuild the driver from the nvidia installer every 
time you update your kernel.

The elrepo kmod-nvidia packages are kABI-tracking so will work 
seamlessly across kernel updates - will even work seamlessly for 5.5 
when that is released too. So it's install once and forget, couldn't be 
easier.

Furthermore, elrepo has the latest version of your driver (173.14.25) 
and you will continue to receive updates automatically through yum 
rather than having to manually update the driver from nvidia (if you 
were to even notice a new version has been released).