Hello Debian forum.

Long term slacker here.

Out of curiosity what kernel is consider "stable" outside of the stock 3.2?
I did an install of the 3.11 backport and there seems to be a bug where the nividia kernel modules do not build right. The same for the vbox kernel drv.

Does anybody use 3.10? And do you have any issues with the dkms builds?

TIA!

Presumably you also installed the matching headers package?

I haven't heard any noise about dkms and the current backports kernel, but I'm not using it either.

I run sid (currently 3.11 kernel) and use dkms for nvidia & vbox without issues (mostly - the first 3.10 kernel was broken for dkms action for a few days - but that is unusual).

For officialy supported on stable there is 3.2 in main or (slightly less officially) 3.11 in backports or then you are on your own

Liqorix kernels are quite popular for those who don't want to roll their own.

I too have used the 3.11 kernels provided in Sid with no issue with dkms for VirtualBox or the NVIDIA driver. Sid now seems to be tracking the 3.12 line and I've updated to that with no issues also.
If you install a kernel from another repository you need the headers as descendant_command says then you may need to run "apt-get install --renistall ndivia-kernel-dkms" and if you run VirtualBox from a terminal you'll see the command for that. You shouldn't need to do it but I've a feeling that sometimes dkms doesn't run for kernels outside of your versions standard repositories the first time they're installed.

Team,

Thank you for your reply.

Here is the kernel and headers I have installed also here is the procedure I am following and the error I am getting when trying to rebuild the modules:


apt-get install -t wheezy-backports linux-image-amd64 linux-headers-amd64 firmware-linux linux-doc-3.11 debian-kernel-handbook

That installed:

linux-image-3.11-0.bpo.2-amd64

along with the headers:

root@oscuridad:/var/lib/dkms/nvidia/304.88/build# ls /usr/src/
linux-headers-3.11-0.bpo.2-amd64 linux-headers-3.11-0.bpo.2-common linux-headers-3.2.0-4-amd64 linux-headers-3.2.0-4-common linux-kbuild-3.11 linux-kbuild-3.2 nvidia-304.88 open-vm-tools-2012.05.21 virtualbox-4.2.16 virtualbox-guest-4.1.18
root@oscuridad:/var/lib/dkms/nvidia/304.88/build#

When I try to rebuild the nvidia modules I do:

dpkg-reconfigure nvidia-kernel-dkms

And than I get a fail from the make.log:

/var/lib/dkms/nvidia/304.88/build/nv-i2c.c: In function ‘nv_i2c_del_adapter’:
/var/lib/dkms/nvidia/304.88/build/nv-i2c.c:327:14: error: void value not ignored as it ought to be
make[4]: *** [/var/lib/dkms/nvidia/304.88/build/nv-i2c.o] Error 1
make[3]: *** [_module_/var/lib/dkms/nvidia/304.88/build] Error 2
make[2]: *** [sub-make] Error 2
make[1]: *** [all] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/linux-headers-3.11-0.bpo.2-amd64'
make: *** [modules] Error 2
make: Leaving directory `/var/lib/dkms/nvidia/304.88/build'

Thanks for the help!

BumP

You may need the nvidia-kernel-dkms package from backports also.

Interesting. I will give that a try...

Well that didn't work.

I did a quick google and other users running variants of debian like aptosid also encounter the same issue on the 3.11 kernel.

I recall having problems when I compiled my own 3.11 kernel but once Sid moved to it the patches seemed to have been applied to kernel and driver and I didn't have any more problems.
It's situations like this that resulted in my running Sid.

I was able to confirm that any dkms module build has issues with kernels outside of 3.2 under wheezy.
Marking this thread solved.

Regards.