nvidia-driver-xxx requires reboot?

[Florian Oppermann]

Hi all,

Our workstations run basically 24/7 and can’t be rebooted arbitrarily. 
On recent workstations with Nvidia GPU the following error messages 
appear after upgrading nvidia-driver-460. The system is then unusable at 
least via GUI / DE until it’s being rebooted. Apparently the updated 
userspace driver is put into use before the updated kernel module could 
be loaded.

> kernel: [574824.181928] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 460.73.01, but
> kernel: [574824.181928] NVRM: this kernel module has the version 460.56.  Please
> kernel: [574824.181928] NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all 
NVIDIA driver
> kernel: [574824.181928] NVRM: components have the same version.

As far as I can see, the package does not even touch 
/var/run/reboot-required as kernel updates do. Also, I couldn’t find 
anything about updates crashing running desktop environments (here: xdm 
+ Gnome) in the documentation.

Is this supposed to happen? In this case our idea was to pin the nvidia 
package and update it only when a reboot is due anyway. Is there a more 
elegant solution?

If this is not the expected behaviour: Who is to blame here (Nvidia? 
package maintainer? xdm?) and where would I post a bug report?

Many thanks and best regards,
Florian

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