[arch-general] How to build nvidia driver?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 11 Aug 2017 03:33:44 -0500, David C. Rankin wrote:
>On 08/11/2017 12:49 AM, Manuel Reimer wrote:
>>> downgrade nvidia nvidia-lts nvidia-dkms libxnvctrl nvidia-settings
>>> nvidia-utils opencl-nvidia lib32-nvidia-utils lib32-opencl-nvidia  
>> 
>> Where can I get this "downgrade" command?  
>
>pacman -U supports downgrade...

Hi,

perhaps for you, if you should have a third party repository providing
it.  My apologies, "downgrade" is provided by the AUR (Arch User
Repository): https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/downgrade/

See https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/downgrading_packages and
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Makepkg . There are also so called
"AUR helpers" available, but you need to build a helper, e.g.
https://aur.archlinux.org/packages/yaourt/ still the old faithful way,
before you could use it to build"downgrade".

You not necessarily need "downgarde"... 

>I believe the intent was:
>
> 1) go download the package versions of each file you want into a
> temporary directory, change to that directory; and then
>
> 2) as root (or use sudo)
>
> 3) # pacman -U *.xz (in the temporary directory containing only the
> files to be downgraded)

...Yesno. They still might be available in the cache:

  ls -hAl /var/cache/pacman/pkg/*nvidia*

If so, the OP could use

  pacman -U /var/cache/pacman/pkg/<PACKAGE_NAME>

and after that edit "IgnorePkg" in /etc/pacman.conf , to prevent
against upgrades.

When using "downgrade", it takes a look into the cache as well as on the
ARM (Arch Rollback Machine) server, see

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php?title=Arch_Rollback_Machine&redirect=no ,
resp.
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Linux_Archive

and after that it asks you, if the downgraded package should get an
"IgnorePkg" in /etc/pacman.conf .

>I don't want to put any words in Ralf's mouth, but I don't know of any
>other way to do it :)

FWIW I'm using my Intel's graphics and not NVIDIA, apart from this I
don't know if the OP runs an LTS kernel or the mainline kernel, neither
if the OP does use NVIDIA helpers, or if those helpers are hard
dependencies of needed packages. So what packages the OP needs to
downgrade and in which order is something I can't say, nor if any of
the packages needs to be rebuild, related to e.g. a soname issue.
However, NVIDIA at least isn't that problematic as ATI, since older
proprietary ATI drivers tend to require dedicated old versions of X
that makes it more or less impossible to downgrade the proprietary ATI
things.

Regards,
Ralf