nvidia-367 367.57-0ubuntu0.16.04.1: nvidia-367 kernel module failed to build [Makefile:81: recipe for target 'modules' failed]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

I spent some time going through posts and trying various things. The best I can reckon from all information gathered so far is something about the upgrade process from 14.04 to 16.04 trips things up for the Nvidia driver build. If Ubuntu 16.04 is installed from scratch, people report it works, but the part of it not working during / after an upgrade from a previous Ubuntu release is consistent. The thing is I have a system that has so much going on on it that starting over would be a huge time kill, so solving this would probably take less time even if it is a bit involved to figure out. Also if it is working on some installations and not others depending on how Ubuntu was installed, that points to a possible issue on the open source side tripping up things on the Nvidia side of the fence. (The notion here clean install of open source 16.04 equals proper environment for Nvidia driver to build while something off kilter about the Ubuntu upgrade process equals broken environment for the Nvidia driver to try to build in. Of course I also would not discount the notion that everything from each team runs to their internally defined spec, but two teams had two different ideas on the details of what is a valid thing to do / expect from the other.)

I am not sure if my issue is the same, but I have a system that has been upgraded several times now. Currently I cannot use an nVidia driver newer than 358. Anything newer than that, and while it applies ok via Additional Drivers (I'm using the Proprietary GPU Drivers PPA), on reboot it hangs with a black screen and flashing cursor even before I get to the LUKS password prompt. If I purge nvidia drivers from recovery mode and switch back to Nouveau then I'm fine and can re-select 358.16.

Ubuntu (Xubuntu) 16.04 w/ an Asus GeForce GTX 750 card. According to nVidia, the recommended driver for this card is 375 which is one of the newer ones I tried to no avail.

I'll watch this bug in case there's any additional data I can provide to help or at least rule out that these two issues are related.

Scott, I tried the same things and got more or less the same result. The older drivers compile, but the machine crashes early in boot. If I remember correctly, this was the case all the way up to 364. Anything above, and I tried all the way up to 375, and it won't compile. I suspect the older drivers crash the system on boot because of the newer kernel on 16.04, which is 4.4 series while nvidia drivers version 364 lists kernel 4.1 and below in its support list. It is a good question why one compiles and another does not. This is one of the reasons why I circle around the notion that something did not get properly updated in the upgrade process build environment wise as it seems the pieces are there for an older driver to compile, but not for the newer one.

Did not find a proper bug description for Trusty-LTS with Xenial HWE for this bug, but it appears the same on such a system. I also tried nvidia-370 and the same.
Kernel 4.4.0-62 is the last one it works on, with 4.4.0-63 the error appears.

Thank you for your reply!
The bug may be the problem of nvidia drivers.

On 2017年02月09日 13:24, Walter Mautner wrote:
> Did not find a proper bug description for Trusty-LTS with Xenial HWE for this bug, but it appears the same on such a system. I also tried nvidia-370 and the same.
> Kernel 4.4.0-62 is the last one it works on, with 4.4.0-63 the error appears.
>

A baseline test I did was to update both a VM with a fresh install of Ubuntu 16.04 and my laptop where I upgraded from 14.04 to 16.04. With both systems up to date (March 25th, 2017) I tried to install the the latest Nvidia 375 drivers. It installed on the VM (though it is kind of worthless here), but hung up on my laptop just like it has in the past. With it both compiling and failing to compile on the same version and patch level of Ubuntu, just different paths to get to this point, I would think this points to an issue with Ubuntu, not Nvidia.

I did some poking around to see if I could figure out the root cause. I found there are a whole lot of differences between doing a fresh install of 16.04 and upgrading from 14.04 to 16.04 in terms of how the system is actually setup, so a quick let's try to find the one thing off was not going to fly. Another wall of sorts I hit is the Nvidia installer is a compiled application and I did not want to take the time to reverse engineer it in order to make sure I could replicate what it was doing step by step in order to figure out the exact step it fails on. A thought I had is I could try to figure out the DKMS calls setup to automatically re-compile the kernel module, but by this time I was feeling pretty fed up, so I just re-installed my laptop. With a fresh install of 16.04, the Nvidia drivers both compiled and work without issue as far as I can tell. I tried installing and opening Google Earth and glxgears and those seem to be working fine.

Another thing that broke in the 'upgrade' to 16.04 was Bluetooth support. Bluetooth seems to work now that the system is re-installed from scratch.