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#1 2016-05-29 19:17:15

marius-arc
Member
Registered: 2016-04-17
Posts: 42

Can't get nvidia KMS to work

I miss the smaller, sharper fonts I had when I had just installed Arch, before installing the nvidia drivers, so I looked at the wiki and it says something about KMS which I hope will do what I want.

The wiki says this:

nvidia 364.16 adds support for DRM kernel mode setting. To enable this feature, add the nvidia-drm.modeset=1 kernel parameter, and add nvidia, nvidia_modeset, nvidia_uvm and nvidia_drm to your initramfs#MODULES.

Took a bit more reading to figure out how to do these things but I think I figured it out. However I can't get it to work.

Here is what I do:
I edit /etc/mkinitcpio.conf and modify MODULES="" to say:

MODULES="nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm"

Then I run

mkinitcpio -p linux

Reboot and press e to edit and change the linux line to say:

linux   /boot/vmlinuz-linux root=UUID=42eb2240-4048-4f4c-a59f-c1de94b319ef rw  quiet nvidia-drm.modeset=1

When I boot with ^x there is no change to the font, and now I can't boot into xfce.

What am I doing wrong?

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#2 2016-05-29 19:28:34

Gusar
Member
Registered: 2009-08-25
Posts: 3,605

Re: Can't get nvidia KMS to work

Contrary to what many people think, KMS is not what provides the high-res console, fbdev does. It's just that KMS drivers typically have fbdev compatibility in them. But nvidia is not one of those drivers. While KMS is now there, fbdev compatibility isn't, so no high-res console.

Last edited by Gusar (2016-05-29 19:29:23)

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#3 2016-05-29 19:52:50

marius-arc
Member
Registered: 2016-04-17
Posts: 42

Re: Can't get nvidia KMS to work

What a bummer. It seems like such a trivial, easy thing really.

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#4 2016-05-29 20:48:48

Tutti
Member
Registered: 2015-02-26
Posts: 117

Re: Can't get nvidia KMS to work

you could use Uvesafb

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#5 2016-05-29 23:09:35

Omar007
Member
Registered: 2015-04-09
Posts: 368

Re: Can't get nvidia KMS to work

You may also be able to get a high-res console with UEFI. This may depend on the motherboard though and requires you have it boot in pure UEFI mode.
In pure UEFI mode the motherboard can initialize the GPU on the monitor's native resolution and this resolution will stick, giving you a high-res cli.

Since I've set my system up as a pure UEFI system, this is what allows me to have a high-res console with the nvidia blob.

Last edited by Omar007 (2016-05-29 23:10:58)

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#6 2016-11-22 04:16:03

reddhawk
Member
Registered: 2012-07-02
Posts: 28

Re: Can't get nvidia KMS to work

Omar007 wrote:

In pure UEFI mode the motherboard can initialize the GPU on the monitor's native resolution and this resolution will stick, giving you a high-res cli.

How did you manage to do that? This is exactly what I've been searching for.

Last edited by reddhawk (2016-11-22 04:16:54)

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#7 2016-11-22 05:21:16

Gusar
Member
Registered: 2009-08-25
Posts: 3,605

Re: Can't get nvidia KMS to work

reddhawk wrote:

How did you manage to do that? This is exactly what I've been searching for.

You don't need to do anything. If the board has support for the native resolution, it'll automatically switch to it, and efifb will pick it up. In my experience, desktop boards do not support this (probably because they can't know what GPU will be used, and having drivers for all GPUs of the world inside the efi firmware is far from ideal), but laptops do.

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#8 2016-11-22 14:09:35

Omar007
Member
Registered: 2015-04-09
Posts: 368

Re: Can't get nvidia KMS to work

Gusar wrote:

In my experience, desktop boards do not support this (probably because they can't know what GPU will be used, and having drivers for all GPUs of the world inside the efi firmware is far from ideal), but laptops do.

This is false. It completely depends on the UEFI implementation, not on whether it is a desktop board or not (or any type of board for that matter).
There may be vendors with UEFI implementations that do not switch resolution (or maybe just don't allow/support disabling CSM/enabling pure UEFI) but that is not a problem with the board but rather with the UEFI firmware it is running. If the board isn't too old you might be able to fix that by updating it or, if it is an older board, switch it out for Coreboot or something.

So far all systems I have configured in pure UEFI mode worked fine:
- nVidia 670 + ASRock mobo
- nVidia 970x2 + ASUS mobo
- ATI/AMD 5700(?) + ASRock mobo
- Lenovo laptop with Intel Graphics (i5 4300M).
- ASRock Rack C2550D4I

Last edited by Omar007 (2016-11-22 14:17:06)

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