# Nvidia Driver - Forced to use old driver and kernel

## dman777

I have a pretty awesome Nvidia card-  MSI Gaming N760 TF 2GD5/OC G-SYNC Support GeForce GTX 760 2GB 256-Bit GDDR5. But only x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-355.11-r2 will work with it, otherwise my graphics are so glitched the screen is unusable.  As a consequence, I have to use a old kernel stable sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.1.15-r1:4.1.15-r1.

sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.1.15-r1:4.1.15-r1::gentoo

 * Gentoo supports kernels which are supported by NVIDIA

 * which are limited to the following kernels:

 * <sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.3

 * <sys-kernel/vanilla-sources-4.3

Anyone know when this darkness will pass?

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## Roman_Gruber

Did you give feedback on nvidia support forum?

Worth a try to tell them directly

--

MY personal opinion now: I have owned so far 3 laptops with nvidia chipsets with gpu or discrete gpu. and all are not working properly

MSI C700 crappy performance much worse as integrated intel 915 chipset, regarding a year ago, sold intel crappy laptop. still have c700

asus g70sg laptop with 9800m gpu, bios bug with wrong memory bars, fixed it by changing the kernel sources for years was solved later by binary drivers. broken by design. sold half a year ago to a guy who will use it with windows vista so whatever

now asus g75vw, several special keyboard keys are not working, error because discrete nvidia gpu is fixed to display, and most laptops use intel / nvidia gpu with screen, wont be fixed propably, kernel reported, nvidia reported, no fix for over half a year

--

you could try to fix the kernel yourself, usually you need to change a few lines so a newer kernel will work with older binary drivers. 

as long as you have a binary driver which works for your screen you are fine.

i also had to use for several months a very old nvidia drivers which were not supported anymore by kernel / xorg-server combination. only were able to use it by adapting the kernel sources.

kernel guys change some kernel symbols, which can be reverted by hand, nvidia-drivers won t load basically because of those changes. 

Need a text editor and some basic knowledge about C / C++

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## jmartos

I'm stuck in the same situation but I have been able to at least move to a higher version kernel, although, the Nvidia-drivers are still stuck at an old version. I was able to use a newer kernel by patching the nvidia drivers. Here is what I did, which will at least get you to a newer kernel.

To get to the following versions of the kernel and nvidia drivers - 

gentoo-sources: sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-4.4.19

nvidia-drivers: x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-355.11-r4

Install the below patch at:

```
/etc/portage/patches/x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-355.11-r4
```

```
--- kernel/nvidia/nv-procfs.c.orig   2015-11-07 20:22:44.937383656 -0500

+++ kernel/nvidia/nv-procfs.c   2015-11-07 20:24:20.755353556 -0500

@@ -360,7 +360,8 @@ nv_procfs_read_registry(

     registry_keys = ((nvl != NULL) ?

             nvl->registry_keys : nv_registry_keys);

-    return seq_printf(s, "Binary: \"%s\"\n", registry_keys);

+    seq_printf(s, "Binary: \"%s\"\n", registry_keys);

+    return 0;

 }

 static ssize_t

@@ -560,7 +561,8 @@ nv_procfs_read_text_file(

     void *v

 )

 {

-    return seq_puts(s, s->private);

+    seq_puts(s, s->private);

+    return 0;

 }
```

Make sure you mask nvidia drivers and gentoo-sources higher than the versions above.

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## Myu

For what it's worth, I'm running the 367.44 driver, with kernel 4.6.x, no patches needed, GTX750 Ti

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## jburns

x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-355.11-r4 is the last driver that does not have KMS support, the newer drivers have a kms USE flag that defaults to being set.  When the driver is built with KMS support the kernel should be built with CONFIG_DRM and CONFIG_DRM_KMS_HELPER enabled.

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## Buffoon

My laptop has GT218M, I gave in about a year ago and switched to nouveau, works like charm. Hardware acceleration is as good as with blob and no worries about Xorg or kernel upgrades.

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## jmartos

The reason for me sticking with the older non-KMS nvidia-drivers was because of issues/conflicts with uvesafb drivers. The KMS nvidia-driver conflict would cause the system to freeze whenever I switched from a terminal session back to my xfce session. I tried without uvesafb, but I could not deal with the low resolution terminal sessions. I have not tried switching to noveau, but maybe I should give it a try. What are the cons of using noveau versus nvidia-drivers?

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## farmer.ro

without reading the comments i would suggest you upgrade the Gentoo box

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## NeddySeagoon

jmartos,

nvidia-drivers used to work with vesafb.

They may also work with simple framebuffer.

The requirement is that the framebuffer driver must not attempt to set up the GPU.

Do your really need uvesafb?

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