On Wed, Nov 04, 2009 at 02:26:56PM -0800, Bryce Harrington wrote: > I've been looking into some problems people have been reporting > upgrading to Karmic with -nvidia installed. > > One thing I've noticed is aside from whatever issue is occuring with > nvidia, there are bugs elsewhere which are compounding the problems and > leading to some poor user experiences. A common scenario occurs if for > whatever reason the -nvidia kernel module fails to build in DKMS:
One example is if 'patch' is not installed - bug 434154. Then if there are patches to be applied to the kernel module, DKMS fails. I can't tell yet if this situation is the root cause of most of the issues or just a corner case, but certainly that's something that could have been missed during development since most developers *would* have had patch installed. > 438398 - If DKMS fails to build the kernel module, the package upgrade > does not kick out. It shows package upgrade as successful. So this > leads directly to... > > 451305 - Jockey misses that the driver failed to build, and so is not > letting users know about the potential problem. It goes ahead and > updates xorg.conf as if the driver was there. X tries to obey the > configuration settings, but of course they won't work, so it exits on > startup with an error message. *Normally* bulletproof-X would kick in > at this point, display the error to the user, and give them some tools > to diagnose and/or debug the situation. Unfortunately... > > 474806 - The new gdm no longer supports the FailsafeXServer option, so > the diagnostic session no longer can be triggered to come up. Instead, > gdm tries several times, then gives up, but then... > > 441638 - The gdm upstart job notices gdm has failed and so restarts it. > X of course continues to fail, gdm tries a few times and continues to > fail, repeat ad infinitum, and the user is just left looking at a > flashing screen. Ick. > > > The above appears to be a pretty common scenario that we're getting a > rash of bug reports about. It's hard to be certain because many of the > bug reports are only including information about the failed boot, not on > the failed build. So I'm not sure if it is just one reason why the > build fails, or several. However if we can solve the above bugs it > should give much better visibility into things. > > > Btw, workaround for anyone experiencing this issue is to purge your > nvidia (and fglrx) packages, remove /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and reinstall > nvidia (or fglrx). It appears that in most of the bug reports this gets > the system functioning again. Doing a full reinstall of Ubuntu rather > than an upgrade also appears to work around the issues. > > Bryce > > -- > Ubuntu-x mailing list > [email protected] > Modify settings or unsubscribe at: > https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-x -- Ubuntu-x mailing list [email protected] Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-x
