[CentOS] kernel-lt from ELRepo vs. GRUB: define default boot kernel

[Yan Li]

On 05/16/2018 03:10 AM, Nicolas Kovacs wrote:
> After upgrading my workstation to CentOS 7.5 (1804), I had to upgrade my
> kernel from vanilla to kernel-lt from ELRepo. My NVidia GeForce 210
> would only work with the driver provided by NVidia, which in turn
> required a more recent kernel than 3.0.10. Anyway.

I'm not sure why you need kernel-lt. NVIDIA's proprietary binary drivers
always support the latest RHEL. RHEL workstations for 3D rendering is
one major reason why NVIDIA is providing drivers for the Linux platform.

For instance, this is NVIDIA driver 390.30 on my Dell Precision 7510:

% uname -a
Linux freesia 3.10.0-862.2.3.el7.x86_64 #1 SMP Wed May 9 18:05:47 UTC
2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

% lsmod | grep nvidia
nvidia_drm             39676  1
nvidia_modeset       1087441  10 nvidia_drm
nvidia              14328472  878 nvidia_modeset
drm_kms_helper        176920  1 nvidia_drm
drm                   397988  4 drm_kms_helper,nvidia_drm
ipmi_msghandler        46608  2 ipmi_devintf,nvidia
i2c_core               63151  6
drm,i2c_i801,i2c_hid,drm_kms_helper,nvidia,videodev

% dmesg | grep nvidia
[   10.515333] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[   10.515339] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[   10.572111] nvidia: module verification failed: signature and/or
required key missing - tainting kernel
[   10.630900] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major
device number 239
[   10.665785] nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA Kernel Mode Setting Driver
for UNIX platforms  390.30  Wed Jan 31 21:32:48 PST 2018
[   10.672168] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00000100] Loading driver
[   10.672171] [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 20160202 for
0000:01:00.0 on minor 0
[  101.124034] nvidia 0000:01:00.0: irq 137 for MSI/MSI-X
[  104.025728] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0
(GPU-29f026a6-c342-5e3c-c27a-5c3bf72bcce5) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0

What error do you see when you are trying to install the NVIDIA's driver
with a vanilla CentOS kernel?

-- 
Yan Li