On Thursday 06 November 2014 10:01 am, Stephan Wiesand wrote:
> On 2014-11-06, at 0:36, Konstantin Olchanski <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> > A few days ago an updated linux kernel and updated xorg packages were
> > pushed into the SL6 updates. These updates are automatically installed
> > by the default yum configuration of SL6.5.
> >
> > Unfortunately these updates are incompatible with pre-installed X11 video
> > drivers for NVIDIA (GeForce 210) and AMD/ATI (AMD E-350/E-450 and socket
> > AM1 on-board video) from ELREPO.
> >
> > These are the ELREPO kmod-fglrx and kmod-nvidia packages.
> >
> > So all computers with these video cards promptly broke.
> >
> > This incompatibility seems to be well known to the perpetrators (X.org
> > API change, leading to crash of Xorg).
> >
> > I think such a disruptive update should have been announced a little
> > bit more widely and maybe some technical solution could have been
> > implemented to avoid breaking X11 outright (i.e. refuse to install new
> > X.org packages if known-incompatible NVIDIA or AMD/ATI drivers are
> > loaded).
> >
> > It looks like corrected drivers are available from ELREPO, but automatic
> > updates from ELREPO are normally disabled because they break themselves
> > (newly installed package fails to reload the old kernel module resulting
> > in Xorg not starting because of mismatch between newly installed userland
> > drivers and old kernel module).
> >
> > As end result, what could have been planned scheduled maintenance is now
> > an emergency "patch Wednesday" with many computers requiring reboot and
> > many end users disturbed.
> >
> > I have to fix about 6 computers with AMD/ATI drivers and only (what?) 20
> > computers with NVIDIA drivers.
> >
> > Please have a nice day.NVIDIA
>
> I'd recommend subscribing -devel - where this batch of updates was
> announced separately when it was provided in testing.
>
> > P.S. To add injury to insult, the super advanced Red Hat kernel module
> > management system (dracut) does the super slow (bzip2 -9) rebuilt of
> > initramfs not once, but twice - once on install of new driver and second
> > time on removal of old driver. What should have taken 5 seconds takes a
> > good 2-3 minutes (/usr/bin/time yum update kmod-nvidia).
>
> To add more fun, the -504 kernel ABI has changes in some agp... interfaces.
> Affects at least the nvidia-304 legacy driver. The 304xx packages ElRepo
> has now seem to be compatible with the -504 kernel, and thus are probably
> incompatible with earlier ones...

We ran into the same problem when we upgraded a number of systems to 6.x.   
The drivers for NVIDIA got broken from 5.10 to 6.X we had to install a new 
driver from ELRepo to get the system to boot with a modified kernal.
When we looked at disassembled code it looked like several variables were not 
decared as 64 bit.  (guess on our part).   In the migration to from SL 5 to 
SL6 some one dropped in the wrong module for the driver!
That is one reason we have been dragging our feet moving all systems from 5.10 
to SL 6.
We have been using Gigabyte GA770T with AMD processor.

We have not tried SL 7 yet.
Larry Linder