nvidia died with last kernel update in squeeze

[fsmithred]

It was no surprise that I needed to reinstall the nvidia driver after a 2.6.32-5-686 kernel update a couple days ago, but I was surprised that it didn't work. I've had to drop back to a kernel I compiled a few weeks ago, which is basically the stock 2.6.32-5-686 from that time, with a timer frequency of 1000 and desktop preemption.

Vid card is GeForce PCX 5750
using NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.22-pkg1.run

This is the command I used:
env CC=/usr/bin/gcc-4.3 sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-173.14.22-pkg1.run
(Oh yeah, after it didn't work, I ran it with --uninstall and tried installing again. No luck with that.)

Here's the nvidia installer log (sorry about the encoding. I don't know what happened with that):
http://pastebin.com/fQXQPe4s

rivafb, nvidiafb and rivatv are not loaded.
I don't see it in this one, but on a previous attempt, I saw an error message that said no nvidia graphics card was found.

I've been suspicious that the card is slowly dying, based on problems like gray blocks on the screen or (in an older lenny install) persistence of the contents of a window appearing inside a terminal, when I switch desktops from the one where the browser is open to the one where the terminal is open. Scrolling the artifact off-screen and back, or window-shading the terminal and then un-shading it causes it to re-draw correctly.

Any insights or suggestions are appreciated.

[roseway]

I'm not sure that this qualifies as an insight, but when I upgraded to the 2.6.32-5 kernel on my amd64 system, the nvidia driver continued to work normally.

[fsmithred]

Thanks, Eric,

Your post was helpful, even if it was indirect help. I installed the amd64 kernel and headers, rebooted into it, and was reminded of another problem that I didn't mention. Part of the way through the boot, there were a few lines of text stuck at the bottom of the screen, and the login prompt came up above that. The last line of that stuck text was:
"fb: conflicting fb hw usage nouveaufb vs. EFI VGA - removing generic driver"

I had previously added nouveaufb to /etc/modprobe.d/fbdev-blacklist, but that didn't solve the problem. I changed the entry from "nouveaufb" to "nouveau" and rebooted into the 2.6.32-5-686 kernel. The screen looked normal, and I was able to install the nvidia driver without error. It seems to be working fine now.