Translations:NVIDIA/nvidia-drivers/62/en

Kernel compatibility
From time to time, a new kernel release changes the internal ABI for drivers, which means all drivers that use those ABIs must be changed accordingly. For open source drivers, especially those distributed with the kernel, these changes are nearly trivial to fix since the entire chain of calls between drivers and other parts of the kernel can be reviewed quite easily. For proprietary drivers like nvidia.ko, it doesn't work quite the same. When the internal ABIs change, you cannot merely fix the "glue", because you cannot know how the glue is used by the proprietary part. If you do manage to patch things up and things seem to work nicely, you still risk that running nvidia.ko in your new, unsupported kernel will lead to data loss and hardware failure.