[CentOS] Error installing Nvidia driver on a 7.5 beta kernel

James Pearson

james-p at moving-picture.com
Fri Feb 2 15:30:45 UTC 2018


OK, I know CentOS has nothing to do with RHEL beta releases, but I 
wanted to test if el7.5 has added support for a particular peripheral 
(Wacom Pro 2 tablet) ... but was unable to install the propriety Nvidia 
display driver (v390.25) on a test workstation - and was wondering if 
anyone could explain on what is going on.

All I've done is upgrade an existing CentOS 7.4 install with the RHEL 
7.5 beta kernel RPMS

However, when installing the Nvidia driver, it fails with:

  FATAL: modpost: GPL-incompatible module nvidia.ko uses GPL-only symbol 
'__cachemode2pte_tbl'

A bit of Googling seems to suggest that this issue has been 'fixed' in 
later upstream kernels by changing the export of this symbol from 
'EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL' to 'EXPORT_SYMBOL'

However, 7.4 and earlier el7 kernels also export this symbol as 
EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL - but the Nvidia driver builds/installs fine on 7.4 
kernels ...

So, I'm not really sure what the issue is - i.e. is it an Nvidia or 
Redhat issue ?

For now, I've managed to hack around this by patching the stub Nvidia 
driver src to change MODULE_LICENSE from "NVIDIA" to "GPL" - and the 
Nvidia driver now installs and loads OK

If anyone knows any more about this, then please let me know

Thanks

James Pearson


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