I’ m trying to do a fresh all standard install on an old Asus laptop I have here with hybrid graphics, after finishing the install and rebooting it always ends in black screen that appears right after “terminate plymouth boot screen” message in the boot sequence.
It’ s clearly related to the drivers, I tried changing the modules in mkinitcpio (add nvidia module, or remove kms hooks), but that didn’t help. All I can do here is adding “single” in the kernel parameter in system.d boot options, but I’m not quite sure what to do from there.
Adding nomodeset as a kernel parameter this way also didn’ t seem to help so far. Also I can’t access any tty’s maybe work? (ctrl+alt+f1, ctrl+alt+f2, ctrl+alt+f3…). I know I can enter the rescue mode adding “single” to the kernel parameters from systemd-boot options and even to enable the network service from there, but I’m not sure how to fix it. I wouldn’t mind the open drivers, but I see the installer already adds the 390xx version (which is the latest supported by the integrated graphics). I saw some older post here of a similar issue and that the person just removed all drivers, and that does work for me as well, but it leaves a bunch of dependencies behind, and running chwd after that still shows the drivers as still installed, so I’d rather find a less messy way that would use the close drivers that were selected by the installer.
this is a laptop , so :
1 - video are for desktop intel
2 - only if gpu (nvidia) is on dedied pci , it will not works with direct nvidia drivers
3- in case of your old laptop , it’s try to get VGA link …
Hi, thanks for the quick answer but I don’t really follow. My answers point by pont:
1 - ok
2 - nvidia is dedicated yes. These drivers were installed by the live iso installer, but they are the correct (albeit proprietary, ones).
3 - I don’t really understand the suggestion.
I also don’t really understand what you mean by “retry with drivers video linux”
Maybe there is a clean and official way to switch from the proprietary to nouveau drivers? I’m guessing those old legacy drivers just don´t get enough attention and this will be common, so using the open ones would be acceptable. I just don’t want to remove each package manually as when I tried that it left a lot of dependencies behind and this is kinda bad for a fresh install :S
nop, adding that there makes no difference unfortunately.
Also just tried from that tty1 rescue mode to ‘systemctl enable --now sddm’ but that just puts me in that blank screen with the blinking prompt. From there I can actually go to other tty by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F3 for example, but there, if I try to login to my regular user I get the error ““System is booting up. Unprivileged users are not permitted to log in yet. Please come later. For technical details, see pam_nologin(8).” Login incorrect”
Ok, so chwd --list-installed followed by chwd -r nvidia-dkms-390xx (390 in my case, you’ll need to replace it which whatever you got from --list-installed) did clear nvidia cleanly and the system fell back to nouveau which did allow me to get to the desktop, so I guess that’s a workaround. Better would be for the proprietary drivers to actually work, but I guess that is asking too much. I think I did manage to get this laptop with the 390 driver to work normally in Fedora (I’m not sure because I tried an insane amount of distros quickly), but I just want this laptop to be my ‘test’ enviroment and as I run Cachy on my main machine, this is how it will stay
FYI, I tried reinstalling the drivers again with sudo chwd -a after booting in, updating and installing some stuff, but that left me where I was from the start. If anyone has any idea how I could get those proprietary drivers to work I’d still be thankful.
that idea was intriguing enough to try, but no joy. I did some research and apparently those 390 drivers came out when we were on the Kernel v4, so that was a while back (~2018). Still other kernels didn’t help here.
Yeah unfortunately these drivers haven’t been updated for a long time already. What we’ve been doing is essentially bandaiding it every kernel update just to make sure it builds. Functionality isn’t guaranteed.
I understand and appreciate the effort, but it may be preventing some folks from even being able to boot into their system after a fresh install. Perhaps for those old drivers it would be best to leave them on nouveau, like some other distros do, to ensure compatibility. Meaning just installing drivers for Kepler (470xx) onward, as those are still officially supported (at least as described in the RPM Fusion page for it). Just a suggestion of course, you guys know best
I’m not saying the 390xx will bork fresh systems every time, in fact I have another old laptop (dell XPS) here also using the same drivers (just a bit newer architecture, but still using a discreet 630M) that installed cachy with the 390xx driver and had no issues (I just couldn’t get prime-run to work, but that is a different problem).
In case anyone is interested, this laptop (that couldn’t handle 390xx) is on a GF108M and the similar one that could is has a GF117M (both GT630M, though fastfetch shows them as ‘NVIDIA GeForce GT 620M/630M/635M/640M LE’).
Thanks! I’ll try that and post an update here. I did try to add those modules there and run mkinitcpio before and that didn’t work at the time, but I see a few more arguments in that echo line, so maybe I missed something important before.
Also, after installing the drivers I checked the mkinitcpio.conf file and yeah, it was looking like it did from the fresh install, meaning in the modules I just had ‘crc32c-intel’,
UPDATE: No joy, still blank, going back to nouveau again :T
Well, unfortunately, it looks like we’ll have to switch to using Nouveau instead of the closed driver, at least for laptops. You can also try nvidia-drm.modeset=0 and see if it will boot, but I doubt in it. Honestly, even if it did work, 390xx is probably not usable at all. PRIME Offload not working, Wayland not supported, VA-API not working, kernel update issues, probably security vulnerabilities. I’m thinking about replacing it completely with nouveau, but that requires verifying that manual reclocking works, i.e. power management, to be able to make the GPU not completely useless in terms of performance and have at least 70-80% over the closed driver. You can also check some difference by creating this configuration file /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau.conf:
options nouveau config=NvBoost=2
And run sudo mkinitcpio -P after that. It would be nice if you could do some performance measurements, if they are satisfactory I will consider discontinuing nvidia-390xx maintenance in favor of nouveau for CachyOS.
I tried using vkcube and glxgears but both use the integrated, I even tried something like __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 __VK_LAYER_NV_optimus=NVIDIA_only vkcube but it as still using the intel one.
I’ll apply the boost and see what I can get in Heaven again.
For glxgears you need to use vblank_mode=0 as well (so DRI_PRIME=1 vblank_mode=0 glxgears), otherwise FPS will be limited to 60. Also note that Fermi does not support Vulkan, so vkcube is useless to run. This true to both closed driver and Nouveau.
Max and average slightly higher, but within margin of error, but the Min results improved nicely.
Here is GLXgears after NvBoost, amazing how mangohud hurts the effect, you can see some results above without it, but I ran with it for the sake of showing the averages and 1% lows:
