Arch Linux

x6herbius

Member

Registered: 2014-06-17

Posts: 5

NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

Apologies if this ends up being a trivial question but I've been Googling for a while and nothing has worked so far.

I have a laptop with an NVidia GTX 770M Optimus card and I'm struggling with display issues with the NVidia drivers. Before installing the drivers the machine booted to the DM fine, but after installing them and generating an xorg.conf with the NVidia tool it will only boot to a (virtually) blank terminal window. The only message that appears is:

/dev/sda4: clean, 242320/15179776 files, 2408585/60689590 blocks

Occasionally this is accompanied by some text about starting services, but the cursor always remains blinking at the end of the process and the login window does not appear. The window is not technically black like if there were no display being rendered at all. Ctrl-F2 etc. to get into terminal modes works fine.

Strangely enough, if I remove xorg.conf then I can reach the login screen fine, so I'm assuming this is a problem with X. There appears to be no xorg log no matter where I look. I've also tried installing the linux-mainline kernel under advice from other posts but with no success. Bumblebee is installed and set up to start on boot.

My xorg.conf
lspci | grep VGA

Let me know if there's any more information I need to provide.

Last edited by x6herbius (2014-06-17 23:35:08)

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

Sounds like the issue that Gentoo just fixed:

https://bugs.gentoo.org/show_bug.cgi?id=513500
http://packages.gentoo.org/package/x11- … ideo-intel

Try the disable dri3 patch for xf86-video-intel.

x6herbius

Member

Registered: 2014-06-17

Posts: 5

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

Thanks for the link but I've never used patch before. Does this mean I need to recompile the drivers myself?

EDIT: I manually downloaded the source for the drivers from the Arch repositories, applied the patch, ran makepkg -e and rebooted but the problem still persists.

Last edited by x6herbius (2014-06-18 12:25:54)

mrunion

Member

From: Jonesborough, TN

Registered: 2007-01-26

Posts: 1,938

Website

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

I'm definitely no expert here at all, so none of this may be helpful. I have an Optimus setup myself, and I used it with Bumblebee (the Wiki has instructions). I had no problems booting and I never used an xorg.conf. This seems to echo what you are saying.

Your posted xorg.conf seems to be faulty though -- at least for using the "Optimus" setup whereby BOTH cards are used. If you only want to run on your nVidia card and bascially cut out the Intel one, the xorg.conf needs some tweaking (again, see the Wiki). But you will also have to REMOVE the Intel drivers from your machine -- at least I did.

I am not at home right now, so I can;t post my xorg.conf for you. (The Wiki has a copy, though.)

Note: My card is a GTX730M, not a 770. This may also make a difference.

---

Matt

"It is very difficult to educate the educated."

x6herbius

Member

Registered: 2014-06-17

Posts: 5

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

Well I'm fine with booting up without an xorg.conf, but ideally I wanted to get the Optimus working as intended so that I could test out some Steam games. Locking out the Intel chip would probably take a toll on the battery, so I'd like to be able to switch between the two. If booting without xorg.conf means that the graphics performance works as it should then that would be a good enough solution I think.

mrunion

Member

From: Jonesborough, TN

Registered: 2007-01-26

Posts: 1,938

Website

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

Yes, booting without, using Bumblebee to run apps that need Optimus functionality with:

optirun my_steam_game

Should work as intended I would think. Again, you have a newer card than mine, so things my be different for you.

---

Matt

"It is very difficult to educate the educated."

x6herbius

Member

Registered: 2014-06-17

Posts: 5

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

I got things working and installed HL2 to test things out, but I'm only getting ~20FPS on things that would be 100+ on Windows. I dunno whether that's just standard discrepancies in the drivers that are to be expected, but if there were ways to speed things up that would be wonderful.

brebs

Member

Registered: 2007-04-03

Posts: 3,742

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

speed things up

I'd suggest trying primusrun instead of optirun.

x6herbius

Member

Registered: 2014-06-17

Posts: 5

Re: NVidia GTX 770M boots to blank terminal window

Primusrun didn't seem to give any performance boost - I tested with both optirun and primusrun by starting Steam under them respectively and they were about the same (low 20s). I also tested on Windows - the Steam screenshot function dropped the FPS momentarily I think, as my average when staring in that direction was 70-80. In contrast, the game was barely playable on Linux.