Comment 8 for bug 484725

So this is probably caused by the current thing that DKMS is trying to do to not run builds as root:

    #if we're root, try to run as a user instead
    if [ "$USER" = "root" ] && getent passwd nobody 1>/dev/null && su nobody -c "/bin/true" 1>/dev/null; then
        the_make_command="su nobody -c \"$the_make_command\""
        chmod +x $dkms_tree/$module/$module_version/build
        chown -R nobody $dkms_tree/$module/$module_version/build
    fi

    invoke_command "$the_make_command >> $dkms_tree/$module/$module_version/build/make.log 2>&1" "$the_make_command" background

---

I'm intending on switching this over to a daemon user (probably called dkms), but i'm not sure that's going to solve the problem still.