Comment 8 for bug 474917

Alright, we'll keep these bug reports separate, although I have a feeling they share a common root cause.

I've another idea to add to the mix. It is possible that the nvidia module *does* get triggered to rebuild by the new kernel - this is bread and butter work for DKMS and why it exists at all. However, it takes a little time to do this. In the past, Ubuntu booted slowly enough that it could do this in parallel to everything else and by the time X started it'd be there. But now with the boot improvements due to upstart, and especially moving X's startup earlier in the boot cycle, DKMS may not always complete prior to when X tries to start. So X doesn't see nvidia.ko and crashes and burns.

The one bit that doesn't seem to fit this theory, is I assume you guys see it flashing the screen for a little bit and then power cycle. Wouldn't that have been sufficient time for nvidia.ko to complete its build, and so then when you restart it should have booted up okay. Yet it sounds like you needed to do a dpkg-reconfigure in order to trigger a whole new dkms run. Do you have any insights as to this bit?

Meanwhile, it's sounding pretty strongly like this is a dkms race condition with upstart, so I'm going to dig in deeper that direction.