Prevent Kernel Backport From Reverting

Troubleshooting
1

My system uses an Intel ARC GPU for video transcoding. As such, I require a kernel version that’s at least 6.2. My Rockstor installation uses the Leap 15.4 base, which runs a much older kernel. I followed the instructions here: Installing the Stable Kernel Backport — Rockstor documentation to successfully install a more recent kernel. However the Rockstor web gui doesn’t include “–allow-vendor-change” in its update method, so it wants to revert my kernel back to the standard Leap 15.4 one (5.14.21).

How do I prevent that behavior?

2

@GoreMaker I think I did run into a similar problem when I installed the kernel backport (which is a long time ago) after I moved my system from 15.3 to 15.4 (including the kernel backport) and I could not explain why that was happening. My non-scientific answer from memory was that, I think I went through a couple of update cycles (for a couple of days, since the kernel backport offers new updates almost daily using the command line (including the respective reboots) and then I did not have that issue anymore. Not sure whether some cached information or something else was “cleaned out” at some point. Maybe @phillxnet or somebody else on this forum has a better explanation.

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3

It looks like Leap 15.5’s kernel, despite still being technically version 5.14.21, has had the Intel ARC support backported to it by the opensuse team. So if I switched to running Leap 15.5, that would resolve my underlying issue without requiring a backported kernel at all

3 Likes
4

I know this is kind of an old thread, but how did you get your ARC card working under Leap? I recently got an a310 to replace my aging quadro p400, but nothing I do seems to pass that GPU through to plex to be able to transcode. I’ve installed the intel drivers from the standard repos, that didn’t work. Tried a kernel from the backports repo, but that seems to have broken my nvidia setup AND didn’t get ARC working, so I had to revert.

5

this is not really constructive probably, but since Tumbleweed seems to be better equipped to handle this card (based on what I was reading all over the place with Kernel 6.8) could an alternative to the sometimes chaotic nature of TW be to use the Slowroll versions that are coming up now?

I personally use the kernel backport (6.17 as of now) under Leap 15.6 still but I also only have the QuickSync available … so I have not installed any additional intel graphics specific kernel firmware/other packages for that to work.

6

Figured out the issue with the kernel backports - gcc and cc, it’s always gcc and cc with me :upside_down_face:

Now I’ve got the nvidia card working, but nothing I do seem to get the Arc to load the drivers now that they system sees both devices.

rockstor1:~ # lspci | grep VGA
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP107GL [Quadro P400] (rev a1)
07:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation DG2 [Arc A310] (rev 05)
rockstor1:~ # hwinfo --gfxcard
35: PCI 700.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)
  [Created at pci.387]
  Unique ID: aK5u.LFWyWCHJn5D
  Parent ID: _axC.mr2N3fBJq5F
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:09.0/0000:05:00.0/0000:06:01.0/0000:07:00.0
  SysFS BusID: 0000:07:00.0
  Hardware Class: graphics card
  Model: "Intel VGA compatible controller"
  Vendor: pci 0x8086 "Intel Corporation"
  Device: pci 0x56a6
  SubVendor: pci 0x172f
  SubDevice: pci 0x4019
  Revision: 0x05
  Memory Range: 0xfa000000-0xfaffffff (rw,non-prefetchable,disabled)
  Memory Range: 0xd0000000-0xdfffffff (ro,non-prefetchable,disabled)
  Memory Range: 0xfba00000-0xfbbfffff (ro,non-prefetchable,disabled)
  Module Alias: "pci:v00008086d000056A6sv0000172Fsd00004019bc03sc00i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: i915 is not active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe i915"
  Driver Info #1:
    Driver Status: xe is not active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe xe"
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
  Attached to: #22 (PCI bridge)

61: PCI 400.0: 0300 VGA compatible controller (VGA)
  [Created at pci.387]
  Unique ID: YmUS.8nA_xJYUzoC
  Parent ID: M71A.2l4k1ZQhCqD
  SysFS ID: /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:07.0/0000:04:00.0
  SysFS BusID: 0000:04:00.0
  Hardware Class: graphics card
  Model: "nVidia GP107GL [Quadro P400]"
  Vendor: pci 0x10de "nVidia Corporation"
  Device: pci 0x1cb3 "GP107GL [Quadro P400]"
  SubVendor: pci 0x103c "Hewlett-Packard Company"
  SubDevice: pci 0x11be
  Revision: 0xa1
  Driver: "nvidia"
  Driver Modules: "nvidia"
  Memory Range: 0xf8000000-0xf8ffffff (rw,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xb0000000-0xbfffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  Memory Range: 0xcc000000-0xcdffffff (ro,non-prefetchable)
  I/O Ports: 0xcc00-0xcc7f (rw)
  Memory Range: 0x000c0000-0x000dffff (rw,non-prefetchable,disabled)
  IRQ: 46 (7320 events)
  I/O Ports: 0x3c0-0x3df (rw)
  Module Alias: "pci:v000010DEd00001CB3sv0000103Csd000011BEbc03sc00i00"
  Driver Info #0:
    Driver Status: nouveau is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe nouveau"
  Driver Info #1:
    Driver Status: nvidia_drm is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe nvidia_drm"
  Driver Info #2:
    Driver Status: nvidia is active
    Driver Activation Cmd: "modprobe nvidia"
  Config Status: cfg=new, avail=yes, need=no, active=unknown
  Attached to: #32 (PCI bridge)

Primary display adapter: #61

I’ve uninstalled the nvidia drivers, reinstalled intel, tried the modprobe commands (they failed with a “No such device” error)