Bug#685617: Allow co-installation of nvidia-kernel-dkms and nvidia-kernel-legacy-173xx-dkms

[Gaudenz Steinlin]

Package: nvidia-graphics-drivers
Severity: wishlist
Tags: patch

If you want to use the full range of nvidia proprietry drivers on live
systems the kernel dkms packages must both be installed at the same time
and the correct module to use selected at runtime. While co-installation
is possible for the GLX and xorg parts, this is currently not possible
for the dkms packages.

The attached patches modify the dkms packages to allow coinstallation.
The legacy packages dkms config is modified to name the module
nvidia-legacy-173xx instead of just nvidia.

Unfortunately both modules claim to support most PCI IDs. To load the
most recent module in case both variants are installed. The patch for
nvidia-support adds a script to nvidia-kernel-common to select the right
module when modprobing either nvidia or nvidia-legacy-173xx. The correct
module is selected based on the existing nvidia.ids lists of PCI IDs.

The patches to nvidia-graphics-drivers and
nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-173xx also move the nvidia.ids file from
the xserver-xorg-video-nvidia-xxx package to the dkms and kernel-source
package to support the above script.

While I agree that all of this is a bit hacky. I can't see any better
way to support live systems and in my tests the whole thing works quite
well. I'm open for suggestions if you see better ways to make the dkms
packages co-installable.

I'm currently also writing a boot script for live systems to select the
correct glx and nvidia alternatives on boot based on the hardware present
in the system.

Gaudenz

P.S.: I'll clone this report to the other affected packages as soon as I
get the bug number.

-- System Information:
Debian Release: wheezy/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (800, 'testing'), (700, 'unstable'), (50, 'experimental')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)
Foreign Architectures: i386

Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-3-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=de_CH.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=de_CH.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
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