Especially if you are dealing with 10's of 100's of workstations, a simple 'yum update' can result in a large number of support calls stating, "I rebooted my workstation, and now it reports that X can't start!"
Workstations with nVidia based cards can use the kmod RPMs provided by the ELRepo repository (is that redundant?).
Unfortunately, there aren't kmod RPMs for ATI Radeon cards (fglrx). Until I get around to rolling my own kmod RPM, here's the solution I use (I originally posted this script on this blog post):
- Many kernels ago, I had built an RPM using the ati-driver installation package and installed the RPM
- Create a script that will build a new kernel module based on the currently loaded kernel: /root/fglrx_build_kernel_module.sh
- Update the kernel followed by a reboot and you'll notice that X fails to start and that the fglrx module is not loaded. Enter runlevel 3, and run the script
- Once the script finishes, enter runlevel 5 and verify that the fglrx module is loaded
$ sh ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg RedHat/RHEL5_64a
$ sudo rpm -Uvh fglrx64_7_1_0-8.593-1.x86_64.rpm
#!/bin/sh
# Builds updated kernel module (based on currently loaded kernel)
#
# This driver was installed via RPM, built using:
# sh ati-driver-installer-9-3-x86.x86_64.run --buildpkg RedHat/RHEL5_64a
# fix the source code to work with CVE-2010-3081
/usr/bin/perl -pi -e 's/return compat_alloc_user_space/return arch_compat_alloc_user_space/g;' /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/kcl_ioctl.c
cd /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod
./make.sh
cd /lib/modules/fglrx
./make_install.sh
echo "To complete the process you must 'init 3' and 'init 5'"
echo "lsmod | grep fglrx"
# lsmod | grep fglrx
# init 3
# sh ./fglrx_build_kernel_module.sh
AMD kernel module generator version 2.1
doing Makefile based build for kernel 2.6.x and higher
rm -rf *.c *.h *.o *.ko *.GCC* .??* *.symvers
make -C /lib/modules/2.6.18-194.8.1.el5/build SUBDIRS=/lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x modules
make[1]: Entering directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-194.8.1.el5-x86_64'
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/firegl_public.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_acpi.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_agp.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_debug.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_ioctl.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_io.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_pci.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_str.o
CC [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/kcl_wait.o
LD [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/fglrx.o
Building modules, stage 2.
MODPOST
CC /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/fglrx.mod.o
LD [M] /lib/modules/fglrx/build_mod/2.6.x/fglrx.ko
make[1]: Leaving directory `/usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-194.8.1.el5-x86_64'
build succeeded with return value 0
duplicating results into driver repository...
done.
You must change your working directory to /lib/modules/fglrx
and then call ./make_install.sh in order to install the built module.
- recreating module dependency list
- trying a sample load of the kernel modules
done.
To complete the process you must 'init 3' and 'init 5'
# init 5
# lsmod | grep fglrx
fglrx 2389736 3
To Do: Rewrite the script to build the kernel module for whichever kernel you specify instead of only the currently loaded kernel. nVidia provides support for this, for example to build the module for the latest EL5 kernel:
# sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-190.42-pkg2.run -a -K -k 2.6.18-194.8.1.el5
