Kernel Update Affects Some nVidia Users – Fix Included

The Situation
It has come to our attention that a small portion of nvidia users are experiencing a failure to boot into X after today’s kernel update.

The problem seems to only happen on some specific configurations involving the unofficial 9631 driver installations and does not appear to affect 877x from the official repositories.

Symptoms:
After applying today’s updates and rebooting, the graphical environment does not initialize. You may get a blue screen with an error dialog or just an empty black screen.

If you’ve applied the updates and rebooted and you can get to a graphical login prompt, you are not affected by this issue..

Affects:
This seems to mostly affect people using NVidia driver version 9631 on Edgy Eft. Users using both manually installed and unofficial linux-restricted-modules repositories seem to report this problem.

This doesn’t seem to affect those using official nvidia 8xxx drivers from the repositories, or those who are using 9640 beta drivers or higher.

UPDATE: One user states that it he is experiencing this issue with the official NVIDIA Legacy drivers too.

This issue does not appear to be as widespread as the problem that happened to Dapper a few months back.

Cause:
The root cause is currently unknown and under investigation. It seems to stem from several key nvidia driver files apparently being removed during the update process. these files include:
Code:

/usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers/nvidia_drv.o /usr/lib/xorg/modules/libglx.soThis issue appears difficult to reproduce consistently. I am still investigating trying to find a root cause for why those files would be removed by the update process.

Solutions and Workarounds:
Currently, the solution/workaround involves reinstalling the nvidia drivers. If you installed these nvidia drivers by adding a repository to /etc/apt/sources.list and performing a system update, please issue the following command:
Code:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall linux-restricted-modules-$(uname -r) nvidia-glxIf you installed nvidia drivers from an executable downloaded from nvidia.com, please follow the instructions for installing that driver again.

In either case, running this command sometimes has good results, too:
Code:

sudo depmod -aeAgain, details are just beginning to unfold about this issue.

On behalf of everyone here at Ubuntu, I apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you.

(original post by #kubuntu-devel)