Friday 7 September 2012

Downgrading from NVIDIA 304.43 to 295.71 on CentOS 6

The latest upgrade in 'elrepo' updates the NVIDIA drivers from version 295.71 to version 304.43. However, it ain't no bed of roses. On my CentOS 6.3 box, 3D performance under Wine took a massive hit, to the point where even sound playback was affected.

However, it's easy to just roll back the NVIDIA driver upgrades and get on with your life. First, grab the latest working version from elrepo:

wget http://elrepo.reloumirrors.net/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/kmod-nvidia-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm
wget http://elrepo.reloumirrors.net/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/nvidia-x11-drv-32bit-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm
wget http://elrepo.reloumirrors.net/elrepo/el6/x86_64/RPMS/nvidia-x11-drv-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm

Now, remove the new, buggy 304.43 drivers:

yum remove nvidia-x11-drv kmod-nvidia nvidia-x11-drv-32bit
 
Beware that uninstalling kmod-nvidia may take quite a while. Finally, install the fresh, old drivers:

rpm -Uvh kmod-nvidia-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm \
nvidia-x11-drv-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm \
nvidia-x11-drv-32bit-295.71-1.el6.elrepo.x86_64.rpm

Reboot. Commence life.

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