NVIDIA's Binary Driver Doesn't Yet Play Nicely With Linux 4.15

If you are using the NVIDIA proprietary graphics driver and anxious to try out the Linux 4.15 kernel for its many new features/improvements, unfortunately you will need to wait a few days as the current public driver is broken against this latest code.

In the not too uncommon happening, the latest NVIDIA Linux driver isn't yet working with the 4.15 kernel due to upstream changes. As is usually the case, within a few weeks of the release candidates, NVIDIA should be issuing an updated kernel driver with compatibility for this new kernel version.

When trying the 387.22 driver with a Linux 4.15 Git kernel build as of today, there were first complaints about needing libelf-dev due to the ORC unwinder changes of 4.14. But then after that when it went on to building the NVIDIA kernel modules, there was a build error due to task_stack_page being changed. The sme_active symbol was also made GPL-only, which obviously is incompatible with NVIDIA's proprietary driver.

So just take this as a quick word of warning until you see a Phoronix news post in the future about a new NVIDIA Linux driver release.