# Kernel 3.10 & nvidia-driver dilemma

## Vrenn

Yesterday gentoo released gentoo-sources-3.10.7. I wanted to immediately test it out, try the new sandybridge driver.

After compiling my kernel-script stopped because the stable nvidia-drivers don't support 3.10-kernels.

edith: Seems that the gentoodevs not masked it, but yet haven't gave it free. Massive problems are reported on the net. Even overvolting is mentioned.

On Windows 7 I was able to reproduce the problems, so I am affected.

Here I found a nice post with a summary what actually happened.

Also take a look at the nvidia-forum.

It seems to me that nvidia tries to somehow play it down, which is a good sign. If you are not talking about a problem it must be an important problem for you.

And I have read of affected chips from the 500 series up to the 700 cpus.

But now I am stuck with the 3.8 kernel and have several choices to get along.

1) stop to update the kernel. Really not a smart and interesting idea.

2) patch existing nvidia-drivers <= 319.32. Nice idea, but the gentoodevs don't support this and will never do it (see bugs.gentoo.org, It seems to just not work good)

3) switching to nouveau. On the positive side: KMS, long updates, wayland (future). On the negative: rumours of crashes, and (tested with knoppix) less fps by a factor of 30. Does even ut2004 run with that? And the featurematrix marks "Power management" as "mostly". I get stomach pains when my fan stops cooling or just freaks out.

4) waiting for nvidia to fix the >=320 drivers. How long will it take? Will we notice about this silent problem?

I don't want to get the solution from you immediately.

First I want to post these links here, as I haven't found them on the forum yet.

Then I want to ask you what solution you might prefer and why?

So what do you think?

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## PaulBredbury

 *Vrenn wrote:*   

> stable nvidia-drivers don't support 3.10-kernels

 

See nvidia-drivers versions.

You have the choice of 319.49 or 325.15 - both support kernel 3.10

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## Vrenn

The ebuild of 319.49 tells me it doen't support 3.10  :Sad: 

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## Vrenn

```
        ewarn "Gentoo supports kernels which are supported by NVIDIA"

        ewarn "which are limited to the following kernels:"

        ewarn "<sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-3.10"

        ewarn "<sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-3.10"
```

I'm sorry I mixed masked and keyworded in the first post.

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## PaulBredbury

 *Vrenn wrote:*   

> tells me it doen't support

 

That has been updated.

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## Vrenn

Wow, thanks.

You are right!

I'll give it a try now.

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## Vrenn

It works. The new kernel gave me some trouble and killed my sound by renaming my devices  and so clearing the settings...   :Mad: 

Libreoffice calc has a coursor-disfunction when moving cells (just no actions, replug works) I don't believe it's from the driver.

Now I wanted to get a real comparison of nvidia-drivers and noveau with a real benchmark. But I was unable to get Ungenie heaven run on a live-cd like gearsongallium (opensuse based) or Knoppix.

Time will show if nouveau gets grown up or nvidia makes a troublefree driver.

Thank you for the advice, I should have synced my tree one hour later than I did...

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## genterminl

Sorry if I'm being dense, but nVidia has finally released a 304 driver (304.108) that supports the 3.10 kernel.  What's the proper way to request an ebuild for it?  The latest in portage is 304.88.

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## Vrenn

There is a bugreport about it, and it is already in the tree (~amd64 or ~x86).

Seems it happened midnight  :Wink: 

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## Vrenn

kernel 3.10 is great. The core-hopping and the frequency scaling looks to make much more sense... (Intel P state drivers for Sandybridge)

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## genterminl

I was the one who filed that  bug, and I was sure I posted the bug number here.  I also wondered whether I had forgotten or never knew about version bump bugs.

Now I've got to go figure out if I simply didn't hit the final "Submit" button, or if I posted to the wrong thread......

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