nvidia driver trouble installing with 2.6.9
 

Hey, I'm having nvidia installer trouble again!
I upgraded to 2.6.9 today. Part of this installation somehow broke the nvidia drivers, but I said ok whatever, I'll just reinstall it, after all, it's built for specific kernel source, and now I'm using a newer kernel....
'cept now the install bombs. It's not a rivafb issue anymore. The installer just can't install.
I tried running `make install` in the extracted directory, and that also didn't work, but it DID hint that I should look at output of dmesg.
Here's what is there:

nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
nvidia: Unknown symbol __VMALLOC_RESERVE
.
.
.
.


well obviously there's normally more than that, but these were the only two lines that looked relevant to the nvidia problem. that second line is repeated 14 times in total.

I haven't a clue how to fix this. Anyone out there have some suggestions?
(I'm runnign slackware 10.0, nvid driver is 6111, which is most recent to my knowledge)

its a known issue,
http://www.uwsg.indiana.edu/hypermai...10.2/0750.html

there is a .diff available if you feel like patching the kernel.
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2....ia_compat.diff

cool. How do I apply a .diff patch?

You need to add this line,

EXPORT_SYMBOL(__VMALLOC_RESERVE);

on line 44 of linux-2.6.9/arch/i386/mm/init.c and then recompile your kernel.

Well, as this is a problem with the NVidia driver, and not with the kernel I think it is wrong to patch the kernel to get the broken driver to work. I think it is better to patch the driver. A patched version of the NVidia driver can be found at http://ngc891.blogdns.net/index.php?2004/09/21/3-patched-nvidia-drivers
IMHO it is "cleaner" than altering the kernel source (that's the purpose of a vanilla kernel, not to have any patches in it) and if NVidia "officially" releases a patches driver you will have no troubles switching to it.

cccc828

thanks, cccc828, the patched driver works fine now. :)