BenV's notes

Good news everyone! Linux 3.8 has been released! Obviously I immediately fired up my compiled to upgrade from the by now ancient 3.6.8 kernel that I was running.
After rebooting my Slackware64 machine into the new kernel without a problem it was time to recompile the NVIDIA binary blob. You know, this piece of garbage. It doesn’t matter if you pick the latest official release version (seems to be 310.32 atm) or the beta that I picked, it won’t compile.
Running the installer will fail and leave you a /var/log/nvidia-installer.log that contains something like this:

root@machine:/# tail /var/log/nvidia-installer.log
/tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv.c: In function ‘nv_kern_open’:
/tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv.c:1521:30: warning: passing argument 2 of ‘request_irq’ from incompatible pointer type [enabled by default]
In file included from /tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv-linux.h:128:0,
from /tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv.c:13:
include/linux/interrupt.h:130:1: note: expected ‘irq_handler_t’ but argument is of type ‘enum irqreturn_t (*)(int, void *, struct pt_regs *)’
/tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv.c:1525:17: error: implicit declaration of function ‘NV_TASKQUEUE_INIT’ [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
/tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv.c:1537:25: warning: passing argument 2 of ‘request_irq’ from incompatible pointer type [enabled by default]
In file included from /tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv-linux.h:128:0,
from /tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv.c:13:
include/linux/interrupt.h:130:1: note: expected ‘irq_handler_t’ but argument is of type ‘enum irqreturn_t (*)(int, void *, struct pt_regs *)’
cc1: some warnings being treated as errors
make[3]: *** [/tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel/nv.o] Error 1
make[2]: *** [_module_/tmp/selfgz7139/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18/kernel] Error 2
NVIDIA: left KBUILD.
nvidia.ko failed to build!
make[1]: *** [module] Error 1
make: *** [module] Error 2
-> Error.
ERROR: Unable to build the NVIDIA kernel module.

Fortunately here’s a little patch you can run to fix it. This assumes you have your linux 3.8 kernel sources symlinked in /usr/src/linux!

root@machine:/usr/src# wget -q ftp://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/313.18/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.run
root@machine:/usr/src# bash NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18.run -x
root@machine:/usr/src# cd NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18
root@machine:/usr/src/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18# wget -q http://notes.benv.junerules.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/nvidia-313.18-linux-3.8.patch
root@machine:/usr/src/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18# patch -p1 < nvidia-313.18-linux-3.8.patch root@machine:/usr/src/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-313.18# ./nvidia-installer # now it should work
Works for me at least 😉