On 24/01/13 08:08, jdow wrote:
> On 2013/01/23 23:55, Phil Perry wrote:
>>
>> Here is the announcement I made back in November that the 310.xx
>> series nvidia
>> drivers were dropping support for older 6xxx and 7xxx based hardware:
>>
>> http://lists.elrepo.org/pipermail/elrepo/2012-November/001525.html
>
> And how was I to know that and how was I to prevent 310 being placed
> on a no longer supported brand new system? It's rather a bummer you know.
>

Did you read the release notes for the new driver? That's how I found 
out. Did you read my discussion thread on the issue? That's how other 
elrepo users found out and suggested the solution.

I really don't know what you expect me to say. We have set up an email 
list to communicate with our users and we use it. We use our IRC channel 
too. Many thousands of people use the software we package. Only a very 
small percentage subscribe to the lists. There will be many people in 
exactly the same position as you. I guess when things "break" for them 
they will come looking for answers as you did, and we do our best to 
provide them. In this case we knew of the issue, we had documented the 
issue and we had a solution prepared and waiting for you. I'm really not 
sure what more you expect me to do for you, for free in my own 
volunteered time? I'm really sorry if you feel it's a bummer.

As I said before, if you subscribe to the elrepo mailing list (or even 
hang out in #elrepo on IRC) we *will* highlight important issues that 
affect the software that we release as we did above in a discussion 
thread that ran for 2 months.

>>
>> No, this is the nvidia driver telling you that your hardware is no longer
>> supported. It even tells you that you need the NVIDIA 304.xx Legacy
>> drivers.
>
> That's not obvious. And I feel I have a rather perfect right to presume
> the board should be supported. It is a brand new machine as of May last
> year.
>
>> That's correct - you need to stay at the 304.xx driver as this is the
>> *last*
>> driver that will support your older hardware (7xxx based chipset). We
>> released
>> the legacy kmod-nvidia-304xx and nvidia-x11-drv-304xx packages to aid
>> in this
>> (see the thread linked above) and pushed them out to the main repo
>> *before* we
>> released the updated 310.xx series drivers.
>>
>> Please uninstall the kmod-nvidia driver and install the
>> kmod-nvidia-304xx and
>> then you can continue to receive updates from elrepo.
>
> I've just tried to downgrade and see what happens.
>
>> Nothing screwed up, nvidia simply decided it was time to move on from
>> supporting
>> aging hardware (~8 years old?) in the current driver release.
>
> Nvidia screwed up. The hardware was brand new about 8 months ago. So I feel
> I have a perfect right to be annoyed.
>

You'd need to take that up with nvidia, or maybe even your hardware 
vendor why they are using old chipsets.

> Now, how do I stop new stuff from coming in? If there is a change in what
> is supported then it behooves somebody to provide an automated test to
> make sure the systems keep running by not downloading updates that do not
> fit the particular system. After all "lspci" exists, reports this line
> "00:0d.0 VGA compatible controller: nVidia Corporation C61 [GeForce 7025 /
> nForce 630a] (rev a2)", and the install could be aborted when that is
> found and the administrator notified.
>

Yes, we had that discussion and if we knew of a way to technically 
implement that we would have seriously considered it.

Please, if you can suggest a mechanism for an RPM package to know what 
hardware is present *before* it installs itself, and then prevent itself 
from installing if the correct hardware isn't present, and do all this 
from within a yum transaction, them I'm all ears. You can run such tests 
in %pre or %post scripts but by then the yum transaction is already 
underway and the package is set to be installed or is already installed. 
At which point the best you can do is log the issue to warn the user, 
which is *exactly* what the nvidia driver does - even then you didn't 
understand what the log entry was telling you. We didn't see any need to 
replicate that.

If you are using an installer script then it's doable, but then you also 
lose all the advancements and convenience of a package manager with 
automatic updates, not to mention kABI-tracking RPM packaged drivers 
that survive kernel updates. Nvidia uses an installer script - feel free 
to use that if it better suits your requirements.

Anyway, this isn't an SL issue so lets please not clutter the SL list 
any further. I'm happy to continue the discussion on the elrepo lists or 
on IRC.

Regards,

Phil