Rebuilding the kmod-nvidia RPM for new kernels

I've been running Fedora 11 on my T61p laptop, and I recently ran into the bug that caused repeated kernel oopes when running a NFS server and serving a bunch of data.

This bug has been fixed with the F11 kernel 2.6.29.6-213.fc11 which (as of July 9th, 2009) hasn't been pushed out yet (it is currently pending for fedora-updates-testing). I installed the new kernel and it has fixed the bug. Hurray for progress.

Unfortunately the yak shaving continues. I'm using RPM Fusion to get drivers for my Nvidia video card in my laptop. Since I'm running an unreleased kernel, the RPM Fusion repo doesn't have a matching kmod-nvidia package for the kernel portion of the Nvidia driver. My system automatically reverted to the VESA driver. Having the Nvidia libraries installed while using the VESA driver caused Unexpected signal: 11 problems for VMware workstation.

In order to build a matching kmod-nvidia package I performed the following (note I'm running 64bit Linux).

# yum install -y buildsys-build-rpmfusion-kerneldevpkgs-newest-x86_64

Now install the kernel-devel package for the newer kernel. I downloaded it from the Koji web page and manually installed it with rpm -ivh.

Download the newest nvidia-kmod.src.rpm from http://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/updates/11/SRPMS/. Adjust the URL as needed for your version of Fedora.

Then, the command to rebuild the binary RPM that matches your running kernel is.

$ rpmbuild --rebuild nvidia-kmod-VERSIONINFO.src.rpm --define "kernels $(uname -r)" --target $(uname -m)

In my particular case it was:

$ rpmbuild --rebuild nvidia-kmod-185.18.14-1.fc11.1.src.rpm --define "kernels $(uname -r)" --target $(uname -m)