Hard-Freeze on kernel 2.6.26 + NVIDIA driver
 

Hi, first post here :).

I was having some problems with my old debian(system rather old, lots of dirty hacks, ended up in systematic system failure) so I reinstalled it(debian squeezy), everything seems to be working wonderfully now but one thing.

I installed the NVIDIA GeForece 7 series video driver(took me several hours...) yesterday, and haven't touched much the computer till just now. I started my usual programming duties and first while using firefox to read some api ref, I got a hard-freeze(screen freeze, can't change to other TTYs, after 2-3 seconds, audio buffer seems to empty out and then nothing). Seemed so odd... was my first non-self-induced kernel panic. Restarted the system, started using konqueror, just in case. Nothing happened. 10 minutes or so later, while using kwrite to edit a PHP script, crash again.

Both crashes happened while I was fast-scrolling up or down in the current window(in firefox I was fast scrolling down to the bottom with the mouse wheel and in kwrite I was doing the exact same thing but up instead of down).

I changed my xorg.conf with the old pre-nvidia one and no more crashes so far.

Concerning logs, it seems the system had no time to log anything, there is no evidence in any of the usual system logs(syslog, dmesg, messages).

One more thing, during the driver install, I got an error saying the gcc version used to build the kernel wasn't the same version I had installed, I continued anyways, the module would compile, yet it wouldn't successfully inject itself into the running kernel. So I installed gcc-4.1 through apt, and I still got the warning, but this time the module managed to inject itself. I'm guessing this is way I'm getting the crash, which is understandable, but I would like some input, as compiling a linux kernel and installing nvidia drivers is not something I consider "fun" under this circumstances.

Thanks for your time.

I'm not a Debian user, but it sounds like you need to do one of three things:

Either install a kernel that was built with your installed GCC, or..
Build a new kernel using your installed GCC, or..
Install the GCC that was used to build your installed kernel.

The nVidia driver is pretty fussy, and while *some* kernel modules *may* work if they are forced to load, the nVidia one will not, probably leading to your problems as I think you suspect. The kernel and GCC need to be in sync for it to work right.