I've found several patches which enable compiling nvidia-drivers-96.43.23 against kernels >3.7 Currently, compiling nvidia-drivers-96.43.23.ebuild against any kernel version greater than kerne-3.7 not only complains, but also fails with the same old vague "Unable to determine the target kernel version" error. The two patch files names are 173.14.36-37.patch and 173.14.37-38.patch. They were apart of Arch Linux and after some searching, I found them here: http://github.com/City-busz/city-repository/tree/master/nvidia-96xx-lts The site also includes a build package file (or PKGBUILD), explaining the depends or limits of the additional patches. I'm not quite sure what exactly the two patches do yet, as it took some time to apply the patches against gentoo-sources-3.12.13, but the two patches do successfully compile. I shall test a little later on, but would imagine they work. Reproducible: Always NOTE: These so far still appear to offer no support beyond xorg-server-1.12
Created attachment 376704 [details, diff] 173.14.36-37-gentoo.patch Suffixed "-gentoo" to indicate ported to gentoo, retaining the original file name for historical references. Change the name as you see fit, but application order may break patching.
Created attachment 376706 [details, diff] 173.14.37-38-gentoo.patch Suffixed "-gentoo" to indicate ported to gentoo, retaining the original file name for historical references. Change the name as you see fit, but application order may break patching.
I also had to manually "chmod -R a+rwX" on both /usr/src/linux & /lib/modules prior to emerging or installing. (chown -R portage.portage or root.root might also be applicable, or there might be a FEATURES flag to avoid this file permissions problem.)
As I previously mentioned concerning file permissions, I'll revert the permissions and debug a little later to get the specific correct chown or chmod incantation. (Wish they had an "edit button" on this Bugzilla so I could merrily edit or change my own posts versus having a conversation with myself.)
YES! These patches work for =x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-96.43.23 for building against =sys-kernel/gentoo-sources-3.12.13 using =sys-kernel/linux-headers-3.9, for which are the latest stable packages.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of bug 447566 ***
Might be a good idea to allow one of these bugs related to nvidia-drivers-96xx building against the kernel to remain open, so users can easily find and patch their own installations on their own. With these bugs marked closed, they're much harder to find and sort from the many other closed bugs. (I figure my old laptop has one or two more years of good use. And in a third world country, might still be usable for a decade or so.)