kmod-nvidia

Important Notice (Feb 2015): kmod-nvidia-346.35 has been released as a long lived driver. THIS DRIVER DROPS SUPPORT FOR OLDER G8xxx, G9xxx, and GT2xx GPUs. Users with older unsupported cards should migrate to the legacy kmod-nvidia-340xx package.

Quick Fix ( kmod-nvidia > kmod-nvidia-340xx ):


If you have kmod-nvidia installed and the output suggests using kmod-nvidia-340xx, then:


...and then reboot the system

Details ( kmod-nvidia > kmod-nvidia-340xx ):

Unfortunately, if you recently updated kmod-nvidia to the latest version, but need kmod-nvidia-340xx, then your GUI will become unusable upon reboot and you will get a black screen.

If you are faced with a black screen and do NOT have ssh access to the system, then one way to obtain a usable CLI is to reboot the system, stop at the grub/grub2 menu, edit (i.e., "e") the first kernel command line, add " 3" to the end of the kernel command line and continue the boot to runlevel 3 (EL5/6) or multi-user.target (EL7) (i.e., CLI). Then follow the above Quick Fix steps.

Also, if you either (1) have not rebooted after the update, (2) did reboot, but have ssh access or (3) know other mechanisms to obtain a CLI without rebooting, then follow the above Quick Fix steps locally or remotely.

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kmod-nvidia provides the NVIDIA driver kernel module (nvidia.ko). It is built to depend upon the specific ABI provided by a range of releases of the same variant of the Linux kernel and not on any one specific build.

nvidia-x11-drv provides the proprietary NVIDIA binary OpenGL X11 display driver files.

nvidia-x11-drv-32bit provides the 32-bit compatibility libs for x86_64 systems.

After installing / updating this package, users are advised to reboot their system. Simply restarting X may not suffice, one needs to drop out of X, remove and reload the nvidia kernel module and restart X. For most end users, a reboot will be simpler.

Supported Chipsets
This driver is the current release and supports the most recent NVIDIA graphics cards (GeForce 8 series GPUs onwards, as well as Quadro series). Users of cards based on older chipsets should use one of the following legacy drivers. Please note that these drivers may not be available for newer OS releases (for example, EL7).

The kmod-nvidia-340xx driver supports GeForce 8xxx and 9xxx series GPUs, GT2xx and Quadro series
The kmod-nvidia-304xx driver supports GeForce 6 and 7 series GPUs
The kmod-nvidia-173xx driver supports GeForce 5 series GPUs
The kmod-nvidia-96xx driver supports GeForce 2 to GeForce 4 series GPUs

To determine which driver your graphics card requires, please use the nvidia-detect utility.

For the complete list of graphics cards supported by the legacy drivers, please refer to the following Nvidia documentation:

http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_32667.html

For the current (346) driver, please see:

http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/81252/

Notes for RPMForge users
Users migrating from the rpmforge dkms package are advised to uninstall the dkms-nvidia driver before attempting to install kmod-nvidia.
There is a potential conflict between elrepo and rpmforge in that both repositories provide the nvidia-x11-drv package. If you are using the yum priorities plugin then the priority for elrepo and rpmforge should be set to the same value to avoid dependency resolution failures, or rpmforge should be temporarily disabled whilst installing kmod-nvidia and nvidia-x11-drv. For example:



Notes for x86_64 users
If your system is running 32-bit OpenGL applications, you would need nvidia-x11-drv-32bit:



Notes for users who used Nvidia's binary installer
Users who have installed the driver by running the binary installer provided by Nvidia are advised to uninstall it before attempting to install kmod-nvidia. Run the same script that was used for the installation by adding a --uninstall flag. For example:



Known Issues

Plymouth graphical boot no longer available on EL6

To restore plymouth graphical boot on EL6, append "vga=xxx" to the end of the kernel bootline in /boot/grub/grub.conf where "xxx" corresponds to the resolution and colour depth desired from the table below:



kmod-nvidia fails to install correctly from a kickstart file on EL6

Kickstart installs of kmod-nvidia fail on EL6. Uninstalling and reinstalling kmod-nvidia should fix the issue. See here:

http://elrepo.org/bugs/view.php?id=98

A fix is to add the following line to the %post section of the kickstart script before installing the kmod package:



NVIDIA drivers conflict with libglamoregl on EL6 and EL7

The proprietary NVIDIA drivers conflict with libglamoregl on EL6 and EL7.

Users must either disable glamoregl from loading by commenting out the line in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/glamor.conf or must uninstall the xorg-x11-glamor package (and it's dependencies).

As this is a configuration issue we feel it is the responsibility of the system maintainer, not the responsibility of the package to decide how best to configure an end users system.

For a discussion and more information, please see this thread:

http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2013-November/002058.html

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