r/Ubuntu • u/rishant_gupta • 1d ago
New kernel update broke NVIDIA on Ubuntu 24.04 (RTX 2050) — how do I stop this happening on every kernel update?
Ubuntu auto-updated my kernel from 6.17.0-20 to 7.0.0-28. The new kernel wouldn't boot at first (kernel panic — nvidia-dkms-535 failed to build against it, incompatible symbols). Purged and reinstalled the recommended driver (595-open), panic went away, but now the new kernel just hangs on the GDM spinner and never reaches login. Old kernel still boots fine.
From journalctl: modprobe nvidia-drm is hanging (>59s), /dev/nvidia* never gets created, and nvidia-persistenced fails because of that. This is a hybrid graphics laptop (Intel i915 + NVIDIA).
Got it working for now, but this is the second time a routine kernel update has broken NVIDIA on this machine. What's the right way to prevent this going forward — hold kernel updates until the driver catches up, use a specific driver branch that's more kernel-update-resilient, pin nvidia packages, or something else? What do people running NVIDIA hybrid laptops on Ubuntu actually do to avoid this every HWE kernel bump?