Unresolved symbol error when installing V1.0-4191 kernel (RH8.0)

[Jeremy Bear]

I am having serious problems with the latest NVIDIA kernel tarball (NVIDIA_kernel_1.0_4191.tar.gz).

This is on a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100 with RedHat 8.0.

When I do "make install" I get:

> Unresolved symbols in /lib/modules/2.4.18-4/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o

> You are trying to load a module without a GPL compatible license and it has unresolved symbols.

(--global_cli, tqueue_lock, --global_save_flags,
--global_restore_flags, smp_num_cpus)

> Contact the module supplier for assistance, only they can help you.

Can someone from NVIDIA please advise?

P.S. I have also built rpms from the src.rpm files (as advised by DustSmoke in http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/sho...=&threadid=6009
) and it yields exactly the same "unresolved symbol" error...

[bwkaz]

Do you have a kernel-source package installed? rpm -qa | grep source to find out.

If so, you probably have to configure it to match the running kernel (or, it is also possible that the version of kernel-source that you have installed doesn't match uname -r). If you have to configure it, cd into /usr/src/linux-<whatever version>, then find the config file under configs/ that matches your setup, cp it to ./.config, and run make mrproper oldconfig dep. Then cd to the nVidia kernel directory again, and run make clean and make.

[Jeremy Bear]

Thanks for your helpful comments.
I have kernel-source-2.4.18-14 and uname -r gives the same version number.

After following your instructions, I now get the following error:

size nvidia.o
text data bss dec hex filename
1248121 92760 32940 1373821 14f67d nvidia.o
/lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o: kernel-module version mismatch
/lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o was compiled for kernel version 2.4.18-14custom
while this kernel is version 2.4.18-14.
/lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o: insmod /lib/modules/2.4.18-14/kernel/drivers/video/nvidia.o failed


Any ideas?

[bwkaz]

D'oh! I forgot about that one. Edit the top-level Makefile in /usr/src/linux, and change EXTRAVERSION=-14custom to EXTRAVERSION=-14 (i.e. delete the custom part). You may need to make mrproper oldconfig dep again, but I don't know for sure.

Do another make clean and make on the nVidia drivers, and see if that helps.

The problem here is that RH assumes that the only thing anyone would want the kernel sources for is to recompile the kernel, so they changed EXTRAVERSION to avoid overwriting their /lib/modules directory when the modules get installed. But if you only need the kernel source installed to be able to compile external modules, you need EXTRAVERSION to be the same as your running kernel's EXTRAVERSION, which is -14.

[Jeremy Bear]

Eureka!!!

That did the trick: many thanks for your brilliant advice.