[pkg-nvidia-devel] Bug#556749: nvidia-kernel-source: update initramfs on upgrade

[Andreas Beckmann]

Russ Allbery wrote:
> Szymon Janc <szymon at janc.net.pl> writes:
...
>> Including nvidia module in initramfs solved all my issues at that time
>> (module was loaded ~5 seconds earlier). Yet, on driver upgrade if I
>> forgot to update initramfs manually, xserver didn't start because of
>> nvidia module version mismatch.
> 
> Oh!  Interesting!  We're having that problem again right now, and it
> didn't occur to me that including the module in initramfs might fix it.
> We may actually want to recommend that people do this.

At least for gdm I don't think this will help because gdm startup fails
(reproducable or never) independently on whether the module was
previously loaded. So eventually this is some kind of a race condition
for kdm:
* the timeout is just sufficient
  - if the module was previously loaded
  - to load the module and initialize the card if nothing else eats cpu
    time
* the timeout is insufficient
  - to load the module and initialize the card while many parallel
    startup operations happen because fewer cpu operations (I don't want
    to say 'time' here) are available
  - on slow systems (e.g. slow I/O (DVD) or emulated as Josef Spillner
    reported) that don't get enough cpu operations for initialization
    while the wall clock time runs at full speed.

Andreas