[SOLVED] nvidia madness

[chaud lapin]

Hi all,

Just now I ran yum update. There was an error message to the effect that the latest nvidia kmod (kmod-nvidia-3.6.1-1.fc17) didn't match the latest kernel, which is still in the 3.5 range.

So I reran yum excluding kernel and kmod-nvidia. Unfortunately, yum did update org-x11-drv-nvidia, so now X won't start, saying their is a mismatch between the nvidia kernel module and the X driver:

NVIDIA: API mismatch: the NVIDIA kernel module has version 304.37,
but this NVIDIA driver component has version 304.51.  Please make
sure that the kernel module and all NVIDIA driver components
have the same version

Looking in my yum log, I see the previous version of the driver I installed was indeed: xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-304.37-1.fc17.x86_64. I try downgrading to that with yum, but that particular version no longer appears to be in the repos.

A couple of questions:

1. WTF is a version of the nvidia driver that is newer than the current kernel doing in the repos? I mean, that isn't going to work, right?
   
2. How can I recover from this ungodly mess? I can't start Gnome.
   
3. How do I prevent it from happening the future? Should I just simply exclude kernel* kmod-nvidia* and the Xorg driver in yum.conf and upgrade that stuff one every six months with the new Fedora and forget about these disruptive intermediary updates?

TIA

Originally Posted by chaud lapin

Hi all,

Just now I ran yum update. There was an error message to the effect that the latest nvidia kmod (kmod-nvidia-3.6.1-1.fc17) didn't match the latest kernel, which is still in the 3.5 range.

So I reran yum excluding kernel and kmod-nvidia. Unfortunately, yum did update org-x11-drv-nvidia, so now X won't start, saying their is a mismatch between the nvidia kernel module and the X driver:

NVIDIA: API mismatch: the NVIDIA kernel module has version 304.37,
but this NVIDIA driver component has version 304.51.  Please make
sure that the kernel module and all NVIDIA driver components
have the same version

Looking in my yum log, I see the previous version of the driver I installed is: xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-304.37-1.fc17.x86_64. I try downgrading to that with yum, but that particular no longer appears to be in the repos.

A couple of questions:

WTF is a version of the nvidia driver that is newer than the current kernel doing in the repos? I mean, that isn't going to work, right?

How can I recover from this ungodly mess? I can't boot.

How do I prevent it from happening the future? Should I just simply exclude kernel* kmod-nvidia* and the Xorg driver in yum.conf and upgrade that stuff one every six months with the new Fedora?

TIA

It takes time for the fedora and rpmfusion repos to sync (your mirror was late with the 3.6 kernel).

https://admin.fedoraproject.org/upda...l-3.6.1-1.fc17

How do I prevent it from happening the future?

Use akmod-nvidia

[chaud lapin]

Thanks. I disabled yum-plugin-fastestmirror, cleared the yum cache, reran "yum update" and that pulled in the new 3.6 kernel.

It would seem the "fastest" mirror is not always the most up-to-date.

[nbecker]

How to recover:

in grub boot screen, hit 'e' to edit. move down to the kernel invocation line (probly ends with 'nouveau'), and add '3'. To start without X.

Login as root on tty. yum remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia

reboot

[chaud lapin]

Thanks, I'll make a note of that, for the next time.

Is it worth upgrading kernel and nvidia between Fedora releases? If I was running extremely new hardware, I might need to, but I'm not. Your thoughts?

[secipolla]

You can stop upgrading the kernel and the driver if you choose to.
And as Yellowman said, use akmod-nvidia. The first time you boot a new kernel it builds the nvidia module (it will still download and install the kmod package when it's available but that doesn't affect anything).

It isn't really the issue you had (you for some reason had the new driver before the kernel) but it's a useful tip.

[chaud lapin]

Installed akmod-nvidia. Thanks.