Bug#795610: Linux kernel backport 4.1 breaks NVidia drivers

[Vincent Cheng]

Hi Luca and Julien,

On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 12:58 PM, Luca Boccassi <luca.boccassi at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 2015-08-15 at 19:27 +0000, Julien Aubin wrote:
>> Package: nvidia-driver
>> Version: 340.65-2
>> Severity: blocker
>>
>> Dear Maintainer,
>>
>> Backport of Kernel 4.1 in Jessie actually broke NVidia driver, with
>> DKMS refusing to build the NVidia module again. So this leads
>> to X server failing from booting.
>>
>> The problem is blocking for anyone using pre-Fermi hardware unless
>> they pin the NVidia driver from testing (which includes the fix), i.e.
>> version 340.76. Anyway this could be a showstopper for newbies. For
>> other users the solution consists in pinning NVidia driver 352.xx from
>> experimental.
>>
>> Releases 304.xx and 340.xx are currently affected.
>>
>> So could you please issue rather quickly an update for these drivers
>> as otherwise the number of reports is likely to skyrocket ? Sorry
>> to put pressure on you but here this is rather urgent.
>
> Hi Julien,
>
> Thanks for the report.
>
> Vincent,
>
> Andreas mentioned a couple of times in the mailing list the intention of
> pushing a new version down to jessie-backports. Do you know which one he
> intended? Do you think it could be a problem for the legacy-340xx split
> process if 340.76-5 was uploaded to backports? Should instead a bpo
> rebuild of 340.65-2 with the dkms fixes be uploaded?
>
> We should probably fix 304xx as well, since it's available in Jessie,
> Stretch and Sid. I'll have a look later tonight.

I've gone ahead and uploaded nvidia-graphics-drivers/340.76-5~bpo8+1
and nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-304xx/304.125-2~bpo8+1 to
backports-NEW (as with all new backported packages, pending ftpmaster
approval). I don't think there are any changes up to 340.76-5 that
would break specifically on jessie systems, so I don't see a need to
upload a backported package that's rebased on top of 340.65-2 instead
of 340.76-5.

I haven't yet uploaded a backport for
nvidia-graphics-drivers-legacy-340xx; we'll probably want to do that
once nvidia-graphics-drivers in sid gets updated beyond 340.xx, but at
the moment there's no pressing need for that.

Regards,
Vincent