New Update has no kmod for new kernel and new nvidia driver

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Thursday, July 15, 2010 06:51:31 Christofer C. Bell wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 14, 2010 at 10:58 PM, Tim <ignored_mailbox at yahoo.com.au> wrote:
> > On Wed, 2010-07-14 at 11:38 -0700, Rick Stevens wrote:
> >> I can see two possible solutions.  One would take the form of yum
> >> checking to see if kmods are needed for a new kernel on the system and
> >> not downloading the kernel if the kmods aren't available.
> > 
> > I thought that was already done with the skip-broken option/plugin?
> > Where an update run would only bring in all the things that could be
> > installed.  The next run would do whatever else it omitted before, if
> > the modules had been built in the meantime.
> 
> That's not how it works and not what --skip-broken does.  That option
> skips trying to update packages for which there are broken
> dependencies.  In this case, there are no broken dependencies.  The
> new kernel is available, installable, and all packages on which it
> depends are available and installable.  The Fedora kernel does not
> have a dependency defined for the proprietary nVidia driver, so it's
> not considered broken when it "can't" be updated.

True. But I am sure it would be easy for some rpmfusion developer to create a 
custom yum plugin that would check the existence of an appropriate kmod 
package for every new kernel that is to be pulled in on an update, and if the 
kmod is missing, do the yum update exclude=kernel* instead. This plugin could 
be a dependency of kmod-nvidia, and only users who install kmod-nvidia would 
use it.

I am not familiar with coding yum plugins, but I believe this is not too hard 
to do. And there certainly is a lot of demand for this kind of thing from the 
users, apparently.
 
> In response to the wider discussion (not specifically to you, Tim),
> asking the Fedora Project to work around brokenness the user
> introduces themselves through the use of 3rd party software is
> entirely unreasonable.  When you upgrade the core of your operating
> system, regardless of vendor, there is no expectation that 3rd party
> software or drivers will continue to work.  It is up to you, the user,
> to ensure that 3rd party software you depend on works in your new
> environment.  If dealing with kernel upgrades that break 3rd party
> software is not for you, and you don't know how to work around it,
> then either find out how or accept that Fedora may not be what you're
> looking for.

Nothing specific is asked from Fedora here. The users just want the conditional 
kernel updating to be done automatically rather than manually, so that they 
don't need to learn how to work around the problem when it appears.

If the rpmfusion repo provides the 3rd party software, they could easily 
provide the above custom yum plugin, right? That way the entire thing can be 
made fully automatic and the user need not worry about it. Once the user 
installs the kmod-nvidia package, the nvidia-kernel-yum plugin gets pulled as 
a dependency, installed, enabled, and from then on everything is transparent 
to the user.

We only need to convince someone knowledgeable to write that plugin and 
package it to rpmfusion repo. AFAIK, once this plugin is done, it doesn't even 
need any maintenance or so. Hell, if I had a free week to learn yum a bit, I 
would do it myself. And I don't even use any nvidia cards under Fedora atm...

HTH, :-)
Marko