keeping kmod-nvidia and kernel upgrades "in sync"

[Paul Howarth]

On Fri, 2006-08-11 at 15:41 -0400, Dr. Michael J. Chudobiak wrote:
> Phil Meyer wrote:
> > For those of us doing servers with FC5, we have to be prepaired to do 6 
> > month interval upgrades, or else just let it go for the life of the 
> > service.  But even then we are careful which kernel we use, and we stick 
> > to that for all like servers.
> 
> Thanks for the comments Phil. Yes, for critical servers (like my 
> Asterisk PBX) it makes sense to freeze kernels. However, this problem 
> isn't normally an issue for critical servers, because no sane person 
> would have kmod-nvidia on a server...
> 
> All I'm trying to do right now is set up family computers that can run 
> TORCS (a driving game) and other games, without incurring a "management 
> burden". So it would be nice if it self-updated the kernels and drivers 
> automagically, like all the other software on the system!

Handling kernel modules in a sensible way is actually quite a challenge
for packagers and dependency solvers like yum. The issues are
non-trivial since there are two different version numbers to consider,
i.e., the module version number and the kernel version it was built for.
There is currently some discussion going on in Fedora Extras about the
best way to package kernel modules. You can get a flavour of the issues
involved and possible solutions here:

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/AxelThimm/kmdls

Specifically regarding the nvidia module in livna; the current
maintainer of this package has been trying to give it up for some time
as he doesn't have the hardware to test it on properly and it's a major
hassle he could do without. Anybody that has an interest in this module
and is a reasonably skilled packager would no doubt be welcomed over at
livna if they volunteered to take it over.

Paul.