Bug#802246: Can't modprobe -r nvidia, rmmod works

[Alexander Monakov]

On Tue, Oct 20, 2015 at 12:22 AM, Luca Boccassi <luca.boccassi at gmail.com> wrote:
> The problem was that the nvidia's modprobe conf was moved to
> glx-alternative and it was not configured (since on a bumblebee setup
> glx is served by mesa). This was fixed by Andreas with a new diversion
> specifically for bumblebee setups. I'm not seeing issues now with
> modprobe -r nvidia.

But if nvidia-modprobe.conf was not active, how did 'modprobe nvidia'
(insertion, not removal) work in the first place? I would understand
if neither worked, but insertion apparently worked — otherwise you'd
notice the issue much earlier.

> The reason for the change was that the old version broke when
> nvidia-current and nvidia-legacy-YYYxx were installed.

I don't see what was the problem. Can you briefly explain?

Sorry to press you for answers, but on one hand, on occasion I help
with bumblebee bugs, so I'd like to know what Debian is doing, and on
the other hand, I don't have a machine with Debian to investigate on
my own.

FWIW I don't think a "special" bumblebee-specific glx-alternative
option is a good way to go. Bumblebee aside, consider for example
people running server-class hardware with a small Matrox card as
primary VGA adapter and NVIDIA GPUs for rendering or compute jobs, or
enthusiasts trying to learn OpenCL/CUDA while leaving their desktop
running on Intel GPU. If the issue is in kernel module availability,
I'd recommend decoupling the concept of "GLX alternative" and "nvidia
kernel module alternative".

Thanks.
Alexander