[oi-dev] Change in video driver ABI

[Jean-Pierre André]

Gary Mills wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 05, 2017 at 09:24:26AM +0200, Jean-Pierre André wrote:
>> Yesterday I upgraded a Hipster installation from April 2016
>> to the latest state (by starting a pkg update).
>>
>> I apparently could not boot beyond the single user mode, but
>> the real reason appears to lie in a change in the video driver
>> ABI.
>
> I had a similar problem, and have partially solved it.  I had an AMD
> Athlon system with an NVIDIA GeForce 6200 LE video card.  It was
> running OI Hipster installed from the 20160421 ISO.  I had installed
> NVIDIA-Solaris-x86-304.132 to get it to recognize the video card.
> When I upgraded to the current Hipster in a new BE, the BE failed to
> boot.
>
> I couldn't find a way to uninstall the Nvidia software I had
> installed, but I was able to boot an old BE that I made before I
> installed the software.  It was using the VESA driver for that video
> card, but otherwise everything ran normally.

Uninstalling the driver should be straightforward :
the install script first only does a "pkgrm" to remove
the former version (before doing a "pkgadd" to install
the requested one).

>
> Then I replaced the video card with a new low-end one that seemed
> current.  It was an Nvidia card with a GT730 GPU.  The cost was less
> than $100.  Hipster recognized that card.  It described my monitor
> correctly and set the resolution to the monitor's default.  The Nvidia
> X Server Settings GUI worked.
>
> That system is still running Hipster from 2016, but I'm ready to try
> the upgrade again.

So you are also back to square one. I took a simpler
approach by restoring the whole system from a backup.
My understanding is that irreversible changes have been
made somewhere (dead symlinks have been found, so some
newly required feature is probably not available in older
drivers).

And I have to give up upgrading.