Bug#1079569: nvidia-open-kernel-dkms: Bricked my laptop. Missing instructions?

[Andreas Beckmann]

On 6/13/25 16:35, marillat wrote:
> On Sat, 24 Aug 2024 19:32:10 +0200 Marc Glisse <marc.glisse at normalesup.org> wrote:

>> and it compiles the modules just fine. One reboot later, I notice that
>> linux is still using the old module. It seems redundant, so
>>
>> apt purge nvidia-kernel-dkms
> 
> I had the same problem when I've moved to the Nvidia open driver and
> spend some time to understand the problem.
> 
> More exactly the problem come from the -support packages
> nvidia-kernel-support and nvidia-open-kernel-support
> 
> Both try to modprobe is own kernel module and this freeze the computer.

Does it really try to load both? (Which shouldn't be possible for 6.15 
anyway, since you cannot built that currently.) Or just the wrong?

> To fix this issue nvidia-open-kernel-support should Conflicts with nvidia-open-kernel-support

If both nvidia-kernel-dkms and nvidia-open-kernel-dkms are installed, 
nvidia-kernel-dkms takes precedence (this will likely change in the 
future in favor of the open module). You can switch between them at 
runtime (and without uninstalling any package) by running

     update-glx --config nvidia

and (not) selecting the alternative with -open in its name.

This e.g. updates the alternatives to the config files which select the 
actual module file names that get loaded when someone does
'modprobe nvidia' etc.
Ideally reboot after update-glx.

At least that's the theory how this was designed to work. I don't (want 
to) have the hardware to actually test it ;-) But I'd like to get 
confirmation whether the two dkms packages can co-exist and switched at 
runtime as planned.

Where would you have expected documentation about this additional step 
needed?

(The idea behind co-installability is to support live-systems to come 
with as many drivers as possible installed and have some hardware 
detection script to select the driver to actually use during boot.
I don't know if anyone ever implemented such a script.)

Andreas