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kalimeroo

Member

Registered: 2015-04-20

Posts: 7

[SOLVED] Failed to start Nvidia Persistence Daemon

Hi all,

I recently messed up my groups by copying groups.pacnew and passwd.pacnew over the groups and passwd files (I know I should have done a bit of reading before but that makes me learn the hard way). I was able to repair my mistakes appart from the nvidia-persistenced.service that won't start. I get the following message when running

 journalctl -xe

nvidia-persistenced[2084]: ERROR: Failed to find user ID of user 'nvidia-persistenced': Success
corsair systemd[1]: nvidia-persistenced.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1
corsair systemd[1]: Failed to start NVIDIA Persistence Daemon.
-- Subject: Unit nvidia-persistenced.service has failed

I suppose that is due to the fact that the nvidia-persistenced user and group no longer exist. I also understood that this service is mainly intended to system not running any windows manager.
Should I thus just disable the service or create a new nvidia-persistenced user/group ?
In case of the latter, would the following be correct ?

 useradd nvida-persistenced -s /sbin/nologin -d '/' -r nvidia-persistenced

or

 useradd -r -g nvida-persistenced -d '/var/run/nvidia-persistenced' -s /sbin/nologin

Thanks for any help/tips.

Kali.

Last edited by kalimeroo (2017-05-05 10:08:42)

glitsj16

Member

Registered: 2015-04-26

Posts: 116

Re: [SOLVED] Failed to start Nvidia Persistence Daemon

The nvidia-persistenced group/user is created by the install script in the nvidia-utils package (or equivalent if you use one from the AUR). Reinstalling nvidia-utils will recreate the needed nvidia-persistenced group/user. Without reinstalling you can directly run both commands referenced in the link:

sudo getent group nvidia-persistenced &>/dev/null || groupadd -g 143 nvidia-persistenced
sudo getent passwd nvidia-persistenced &>/dev/null || useradd -c 'NVIDIA Persistence Daemon' -u 143 -g nvidia-persistenced -d '/' -s /sbin/nologin nvidia-persistenced

Whether you'll want to enable/disable the nvidia-persistenced service ultimately depends on your specific (NVIDIA) hardware. I have mine disabled on a non-hybrid single GPU machine without any issues. Best of luck

Last edited by glitsj16 (2017-05-03 04:09:14)

Ropid

Member

Registered: 2015-03-09

Posts: 1,069

Re: [SOLVED] Failed to start Nvidia Persistence Daemon

[...]

Whether you'll want to enable/disable the nvidia-persistenced service ultimately depends on your specific (NVIDIA) hardware. I have mine disabled on a non-hybrid single GPU machine without any issues. Best of luck

I recently found a use for nvidia-persistenced:

For me here, the screen flickers when using a text console if nothing is using the GPU. The screen turns black for a moment, then the image comes back again, and this repeats every few seconds. When Xorg is running on tty7, there's no flicker in the console on tty2 etc., so it's not an issue if there's a display manager started at boot. I then recently noticed that using nvidia-persistenced fixes this console flicker issue same as keeping X running at all times.

kalimeroo

Member

Registered: 2015-04-20

Posts: 7

Re: [SOLVED] Failed to start Nvidia Persistence Daemon

I decided to keep the nvidia-persistenced running eventhough I do not apparently need it at the moment as I always run X. Re-installation of the package did not solve the issue but manually adding the user and group, as suggested by glitsj16, did the trick.
Thanks for your help