Arch Linux

tethys

Member

Registered: 2019-08-13

Posts: 166

[SOLVED]How to update my system with new nvidia-580xx-dkms

As I have a Pascal Nvidia card I will have to now use the "nvidia-580xx-dkms" from AUR and I have some questions about how to perform future system updates.

So I will have to uninstall "nvidia" package and install "nvidia-580xx-dkms" together with "dkms" and "linux-headers" packages.
After doing that:
1) Is it sufficient to perform "pacman -Syu" for updating the system? WIll the dkms libalpm hooks take care of the rest?
2) I have added nvidia, nvidia_modeset, nvidia_uvm and nvidia_drm to the initramfs: I don't have to change something here, do I?
3) How often should I update the "nvidia-580xx-dkms" package? As I understand, it's not necessary to update it with every "pacman -Syu", is that right? I am asking this because I do not want to use AUR helpers that will automatically check for AUR updates.
4) Anything else needed?

Thank you in advance for your help!

Last edited by tethys (Yesterday 17:22:43)

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,185

Website

Re: [SOLVED]How to update my system with new nvidia-580xx-dkms

1. Yes, so long as the dkms build completes successfully.
2. No.
3. The same as any other AUR package -- as often as it needs updating. AFAIU Nvidia will continue to update the 580xx series driver for three years.
4. Be sure to install the lib32-nvidia-580xx-utils package if you need 32-bit graphics support (e.g. for Steam).

Mod note: Moving to AUR Issues.

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tethys

Member

Registered: 2019-08-13

Posts: 166

Re: [SOLVED]How to update my system with new nvidia-580xx-dkms

Thank you WorMzy for your reply.

I uninstalled the old nvidia(-utils) and installed the nvidia-580xx-dkms/utils packages from AUR, without performing a full system update, and everything went well.

I would have two more quenstions related to dkms and the installation process with pacman.

1. Yes, so long as the dkms build completes successfully.

As I could understand, one must add a module to dkms, build it, and only after that the module can be installed. In the output of "pacman -U" that installed the packages from AUR I could read:

[ALPM] running '70-dkms-install.hook'...
[ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> dkms install --no-depmod nvidia/580.119.02 -k 6.17.9-arch1-1
[ALPM-SCRIPTLET] ==> depmod 6.17.9-arch1-1

So now the questions:
1) When was the nvidia module added to dkms and when was built? Was this done implicitly by the '70-dkms-install.hook' by calling "dkms install" based on the information in "dkms.conf"?
2) I noticed that "/usr/share/libalpm/" contains, besides the "hooks" directory, also a "scripts" directory, which contains a script called "dkms". When are these scripts run? I could not find any information in the wiki pacman page about this.

loqs

Member

Registered: 2014-03-06

Posts: 18,728

Re: [SOLVED]How to update my system with new nvidia-580xx-dkms

1) When was the nvidia module added to dkms and when was built? Was this done implicitly by the '70-dkms-install.hook' by calling "dkms install" based on the information in "dkms.conf"?

Yes

2) I noticed that "/usr/share/libalpm/" contains, besides the "hooks" directory, also a "scripts" directory, which contains a script called "dkms". When are these scripts run? I could not find any information in the wiki pacman page about this.

/usr/share/libalpm/hooks/70-dkms-install.hook calls /usr/share/libalpm/scripts/dkms which calls `dkms install`. /usr/share/libalpm/hooks/70-dkms-install.hook and /usr/share/libalpm/scripts/dkms are both shell scripts you can inspect. The scripts directory contains scripts that are not themselves hooks.

tethys

Member

Registered: 2019-08-13

Posts: 166

Re: [SOLVED]How to update my system with new nvidia-580xx-dkms

Oh, thank you loqs!

I did not notice the path of the script called in '70-dkms-install.hook', implicitly thinking that the "/usr/bin/dkms" (itself a bash script) is called there!

Marked as solved.