Upgrading nvidia drivers causes boot hang with pae kernel

[James Hunt]

Binary package hint: nvidia-common

If you use the proprietary nvidia drivers and you have manually installed the PAE kernel (for example to make use of >4GB of RAM), upgrading the nvidia drivers will cause the boot to hang.

The problem is that the nvidia-current package depends on:

  linux-headers-generic | linux-headers

This means that an upgrade of the nvidia drivers will upgrade the linux-headers package. However, once the new nvidia drivers are installed, they build a module *based on the current running kernel*. If this current running kernel is the PAE variant, the nvidia package will not be able to find the headers for kernel "linux-generic-image-pae", resulting in a boot hang (no graphics).

A quick fix is to ensure you have both sets of headers installed:

  sudo apt-get install linux-generic-headers linux-generic-headers-pae

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.04
Package: nvidia-common 0.2.30
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.38-8.42-generic-pae 2.6.38.2
Uname: Linux 2.6.38-8-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Apr 28 10:07:17 2011
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 10.10 "Maverick Meerkat" - Release i386 (20101007)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_GB:en
 PATH=(custom, user)
 LANG=en_GB.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nvidia-common
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to natty on 2011-04-23 (4 days ago)

[James Hunt (jamesodhunt)]

Best solution may be to make nvidia-current depend on a virtual package for kernel headers and have *that* package depend on all of:

  linux-headers
  linux-headers-generic
  linux-headers-generic-pae

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

Hey jamesodhunt,

You filed this bug report against natty, but I see it's still open and
doesn't appear to have much activity recently. So, now that oneiric
is released and stable, this may be a good point for you to upgrade
and re-test if this issue is still present there.

If it's solved in the new release and you think it's worth backporting
the fix, please indicate that. Or if having the fix in the new release
is good enough, feel free to close out the bug (or let us know and we'll
close it.)

If it's not solved, leave the bug report open. I can't promise we'll
get to it (we get way more bugs filed than we can usually get to), but
your testing and feedback can help out if and when we do.

[bugbot (bugbot)]

We're closing this bug since it is has been some time with no response from the original reporter. However, if the issue still exists please feel free to reopen with the requested information. Also, if you could, please test against the latest development version of Ubuntu, since this confirms the bug is one we may be able to pass upstream for help.