After (still..) waiting for an updated version of the NVIDIA 580.xx drivers, I decided to do some more investigation of the GPL-only fail after my hack of the ‘proprietary’ branch of driver 580.119.02..
I soon found that the “… GPL-incompatible module nvidia.ko uses GPL-only symbol ‘__vma_start_write’ ..” issue had first occurred with Kernel 6.15, so (once again) the – convoluted – CONFTEST driver code in the NVIDIA driver must have included the correct test/workaround for this, but changes in 6.19 cased that test to fail..
I found a patch for Kernel 6.15, which included the tradition kernel-version-test, with an appropriate fix..    I incorporated this in my previous – unsuccessful – patch for 580.119.02/proprietary, and simply changed the version test from ‘6.15.0’ to ‘6.19.0’ ..
# uname -a
Linux rgxeonl 6.19.0-rc2 #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Sat Dec 27 19:15:49 PST 2025 x86_64 GNU/Linux
# nvidia-smi
Sat Dec 27 20:05:46 2025        
+—————————————————————————————–+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.119.02             Driver Version: 580.119.02     CUDA Version: 13.0     |
+—————————————–+————————+———————-+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti     Off |   00000000:03:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 46%   33C    P0            N/A  /   75W |      15MiB /   4096MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+—————————————–+————————+———————-+
– and the usual tests – with KDE/Plasma (Fedora 43) and VMware 25H2 with Win10 Client – were successful..
As before, I will put together a ‘cheat sheet’ detailing the changes I made, and publish this soon..     After what happened at my recent hack publication, NVIDIA may release an updated driver, which would be ideal, but I’m not holding my breath..
At least, my old GTX-based systems will still be able to function with the ‘latest’ kernel, for the time being…

Robert Gadsdon.   December 27th 2025.