NVIDIA and DKMS

[Paul Howarth]

Claude Jones wrote:
> The Dell DKMS package and NVIDIA driver worked as advertised for me tonight. 
> It's the first time I'd had occasion to try it on Fedora. For those who don't 
> know, DKMS (dynamic kernel module support) is a package available from 
> sourceforge repo. It automatically detects a new kernel when installed, and 
> builds the new kernel module required to run the NVIDIA driver. I'd seen it 
> in action on another distro, previously, but had previously used the Livna 
> repositories to get my modules for ATI and NVIDIA, waiting usually a day or 
> two or more on occasion, before my video drivers were working again. With the 
> installation of FC6 I decided to switch over to Freshrpms/Dries which 
> provides the drivers and DKMS. This was my first test of an update with this 
> new combo. This was completely painless - I installed the new kernel, 
> rebooted, and seconds into the reboot, the message appeared that a new module 
> was being built, which took all of about 15 seconds, then the boot proceeded 
> normally, and I'm up and running now. 
> 
> This is not intended to throw gasoline on the recent pis_ing contest - I've 
> purposefully stayed out of that. BUT, I'm curious. Is there a downside to 
> DKMS? Why is it not being pushed more agressively? It seems to work quite 
> well. 

dkms works very well in my experience; it was the preferred method for 
install the ppp_mppe encryption module for a while before it got into 
the upstream kernel, and I made my own dkms packages for the advansys 
SCSI module whilst it wasn't in the Fedora kernel.

The main reason that it isn't in more widespread use is that using it 
requires that the end user system has a development environment (gcc, 
kernel-devel etc.) installed, and that's not always the case. Well, 
actually dkms also supports the inclusion of precompiled binary drivers 
in packages but that doesn't buy you much over the alternative approaches.

There was a discussion on dkms-based kernel module packages on 
fedora-packaging recently:
http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-packaging/2006-October/msg00039.html

Paul.