Arch Linux

JRay

Member

From: Mississippi

Registered: 2024-06-22

Posts: 6

Do NOT remove KMS from HOOK for NVIDIA Drivers with Wayland

Hello, folks.

I have a laptop with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070. I have been using it with i3wm on X11 with driver version 550 on kernel 6.9.5 until two weeks ago when I started to have issues with display after the kernel was updated to 6.9.6. For a detailed description, see the forum post;

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=297023

While the issue happened to be caused by the UEFI settings and I eventually solved it with a CMOS reset, I started to have problems using the NVIDIA drivers regardless. I had to switch to the integrated GPU (and after some time to the Nouveau driver) for some time because neither the display manager (GDM) nor the i3wm worked with the proprietary drivers.

Recently, last weekend, I did a fresh install on my system and decided to go with KDE Plasma with SDDM on Wayland and got the same issue. Two days ago I figured that NVIDIA drivers could start SDDM properly only after I enabled KMS on the HOOKS again. I would like to do more tests on different display managers and desktop environments to see if this is the general case. I will also try to see if enabling KMS solves the issue I had with the i3wm (or X11 in general). For a related problem, please look at;

https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=295937

As far as I understood from the current Wiki page for NVIDIA, the reason to disable KMS is to make sure that the kernel does not choose Nouveau in the init process. Do other NVIDIA users have a similar experience as I had? Do you think the Wiki page needs a proper update to address this issue? I am a newbie user, so I want to make sure I am actually addressing the issue correctly. I would also appreciate it if you could refer me to the proper resources for learning how to track and debug the GPU and CPU on Arch.

Last edited by JRay (2024-07-04 21:57:31)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 22,721

Re: Do NOT remove KMS from HOOK for NVIDIA Drivers with Wayland

Thats happenstance, the kms hook is there to ensure to include "a" KMS kernel module is included,  nouveau module is that by default and will be that when you initially install the nvidia driver, you can get the logically same effect by explicitly listing the nvidia modules as reccommended in the section about modesetting. But yes once you boot with the nvidia drivers with the nvidia_drm.modeset=1 parameter set, you can technically reinstate the KMS hook and it should correctly pick up the nvidia driver instead.