Kernel update breaks video drivers

[vponomarev]

Hi!

I'm running Proxmox on top of Debian 12 with KDE.

I followed the instructions how to configure the system, which also switches kernel from regular Debian's to PVE counterpart.
As of yesterday, I updated to version 6.8.12-7-pve and, as the last several times, I had to manually reinstall the video driver in order to boot into the the desktop environment after the update.

I install drivers in the following manner:
1. Download the drivers directly from nvidia.com, e.g. "NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-550.120.run"
2. Run this package as root: "NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-550.120.run --dkms"
3. Follow the on-screen prompts.

This results in a normal driver installation into the current kernel, but whenever the kernel is updated, the driver is no longer there.
My goal is to only install the driver once (or whenever I need to update it), and I want to avoid manually reinstalling it every time the kernel updates.
I thought that "--dkms" parameter would take care of that, but, as I mentioned above, that didn't work for yesterday's update.

I cannot call myself a Linux expert, and don't know everything, so any pointers to how to solve this issue would be much appreciated.
May be this is by design and/or not supported?

Thanks in advance.

 

[fabian]

if the driver is registered with DKMS, as part of the upgrade it should be rebuilt (and if that fails, it should print a warning pointing at the log file). could you post the output of "dkms status"?

 

[vponomarev]

if the driver is registered with DKMS, as part of the upgrade it should be rebuilt (and if that fails, it should print a warning pointing at the log file). could you post the output of "dkms status"?

Thanks for your response!
Looks like I didn't have dkms package installed, lol. I swear I remember installing it, but it was showing as "residual config".
After installing this package, I rerun the driver installation, and now dkms status shows:

nvidia/550.135, 6.8.12-7-pve, x86_64: installed

So, hopefully, next time kernel updates it will work as expected.
Thanks again!