Nvidia module disappears after reboot

[Andre LeBlanc]

every time I reboot my laptop Xorg fails to start claiming there is no nvidia module. trying to manually modprobe the driver tells me that /lib/modules/2.6.20-12-generic/volatile/nvidia.ko does not exist. and I can confirm that there is no such file. if I apt-get install --reinstall linux-restricted-modules-`uname -r` the driver installs properly, but its gone again after a reboot. this is with the latest updates to feisty as of this morning.

[Andre LeBlanc (andrepleblanc)]

after todays update to 2.6.20-13 the driver is still disappearing. can anyone suggest a workaround?

[Sitsofe Wheeler (sitsofe)]

Thank you for your bug report.

Andre:
Is the problem still happening with 2.6.20-16?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux-restricted-modules-2.6.20 (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

I'm getting exactly the same with Gutsy RC. (Except for kernel version 2.6.22-14-386). The files 'nvidia.ko' and 'nvidia_new.ko' and 'nvidia_legacy.ko' are all disappearing on rebooting

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

I'm guessing that this is related to the following line in my /etc/mtab

lrm /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-386/volatile tmpfs rw 0 0

I've no idea how this is supposed to work, though. Other modules in /lib/modules/2.6.22-14-386/volatile do not disappear on rebooting (or maybe they are recreated)

To flag up importance, this makes compiz etc useless for me, and even X won't boot if I have 'nvidia' as my driver in xorg.conf. I think I first came across this bug when using the Kubuntu restricted drivers tool. I chose the nVidia drivers and reboot as requested, but when I rebooted it didn't work. With manual messing around with packages etc, I did get it to work eventually, but no solution that would persist across a reboot.

[Markus Schlager (m-slg)]

A reason why 'nvidia.ko' at al. are disappearing on reboot could be an entry like

DISABLED_MODULES="nv"

in /etc/default/linux-restricted-modules-common.

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

Yep, I had this line. (I cannot remember why. If I edited the file manually it must have been because I needed to in a previous version).

Removing this line fixes the the problem. As far as anyone upgrading is concerned, this is still a bug.

[Timo Aaltonen (tjaalton)]

Upgrades can't touch that file, so the admin should know how to fix the situation.

[Luke Plant (spookylukey)]

This is hardly a satisfactory solution. 'The admin' ??? We are talking about a desktop machine, which, if they hit this bug, will be useless to the typical user after an upgrade. How are they supposed to know to edit that file? X didn't start at all, so I couldn't revert the change I had made to use the nvidia driver. (NB: I use Kubuntu, i.e. KDE not Gnome, I don't know whether 'bullet proof X' would make this better for a Gnome user).