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the_jest

Member

Registered: 2022-02-07

Posts: 38

[SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

I've recently built a new system, and just got a new graphics card. It worked fine out-of-the-box with the nouveau driver, so I tried to install the nvidia drivers, as detailed in the wiki:

I made sure the system was fully up-to-date, and then installed nvidia, nvidia-utils, and nvidia-settings, via pacman. I removed "kms" from the "HOOKS" array in /etc/mkinitcpio.conf, and I regenerated the initramfs with "mkinitcpio -P"; this command ran successfully. I rebooted the system, and everything works fine (it boots normally, I have normal graphics) but it's still using the nouveau driver:

% lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GA106 [GeForce RTX 3060 Lite Hash Rate] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 8816
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau

What else am I supposed to do? There were no errors throughout this process, and the Nvidia Troubleshooting wiki page didn't have anything useful.

Last edited by the_jest (2023-04-14 17:17:17)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,727

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

What does `uname -r` show? What version of the nvidia package?

the_jest

Member

Registered: 2022-02-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

What does `uname -r` show? What version of the nvidia package?

% uname -r
6.2.10-arch1-1
% pacman -Q nvidia
nvidia 530.41.03-3

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,727

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

That all lines up. Are you using UKI or anything like that? Something that would have a separate copy of the initramfs that's being used?

the_jest

Member

Registered: 2022-02-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

That all lines up. Are you using UKI or anything like that? Something that would have a separate copy of the initramfs that's being used?

No, at least I don't think I am. I originally had some bootloader problems, and then got things going with systemd-boot, but I think that I didn't screw anything up in the process. My /boot directory has:

% ls /boot
efi  grub  initramfs-linux-fallback.img  initramfs-linux.img  vmlinuz-linux

(I thought I had removed grub entirely, but in any case, I'm pretty sure it's systemd-boot that's running everything.)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,727

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

That's /boot, but is that where the ESP is mounted? If so, where's the 'loader' dir that systemd-boot reads it's configuration from?

the_jest

Member

Registered: 2022-02-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

That's /boot, but is that where the ESP is mounted? If so, where's the 'loader' dir that systemd-boot reads it's configuration from?

Er.... I'm not sure. I remember making changes to a loader.conf file while I was installing this, but it's not currently visible (i.e. there's no /efi, and /boot/efi is empty). How can I tell, from the running system?

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,727

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

lsblk should show what you have mounted and where. Where is the ESP mounted?

the_jest

Member

Registered: 2022-02-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

lsblk should show what you have mounted and where. Where is the ESP mounted?

I'm afraid I don't really have much of an understanding of the boot process, and I'm not sure how to answer this. I do have an EFI partition, but it's not mounted on the running system. That is:

# fdisk -l
[...]
Device            Start       End   Sectors   Size Type
/dev/nvme0n1p1     2048   1050623   1048576   512M EFI System
/dev/nvme0n1p2  1050624  34605055  33554432    16G Linux swap
/dev/nvme0n1p3 34605056 976773119 942168064 449.3G Linux filesystem

[...]

% lsblk
NAME        MAJ:MIN RM   SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINTS
[...]
nvme0n1     259:2    0 465.8G  0 disk 
├─nvme0n1p1 259:3    0   512M  0 part 
├─nvme0n1p2 259:4    0    16G  0 part [SWAP]
└─nvme0n1p3 259:5    0 449.3G  0 part /

(Thank you for sticking with this.)

Scimmia

Fellow

Registered: 2012-09-01

Posts: 13,727

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

So that's why you're having this issue, you're not loading the initramfs that you regenerated, because that's on the ESP.

You need to clear out the /boot dir on the root partition, mount the ESP there, add it to fstab, and regenerate the initcpio again.

the_jest

Member

Registered: 2022-02-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

So that's why you're having this issue, you're not loading the initramfs that you regenerated, because that's on the ESP.

You need to clear out the /boot dir on the root partition, mount the ESP there, add it to fstab, and regenerate the initcpio again.

OK. I will try to do this, and hope I don't run into problems with this process. I'll report back here....

Thank you again.

the_jest

Member

Registered: 2022-02-07

Posts: 38

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia driver won't load, on fully up-to-date system

To my absolute astonishment, I was able to do this very easily, and it worked, and I am now running the nvidia driver, and everything seems fine.

Thank you so much for sticking with this, and for recognizing the X in my unintentional XY problem.