[SOLVED] Nvidia VGA Console warning

justasug · 2016-11-22 23:22:42

I switched to the proprietary Nvidia driver for my GPU. I have noticed a warning in the dmesg output. It says:

[   17.771820] NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console
[   17.771823] NVRM: on the primary VGA device. The NVIDIA Linux graphics driver
[   17.771824] NVRM: requires the use of a text-mode VGA console. Use of other console
[   17.771825] NVRM: drivers including, but not limited to, vesafb, may result in
[   17.771825] NVRM: corruption and stability problems, and is not supported.

After searching the forums, I managed to find this relevant thread. There is a suggestion to add "video=vesa:off vga=normal" to the kernel line. I did and the message stopped showing up. However, there are side-effects in the form of having huge text in the TTYs. Without adding "video=vesa:off vga=normal", everything is working fine. The TTYs' text is normal sized, I can switch to a TTY with CTRL+ALT+Fx without any problems and I don't see any graphical glitches elsewhere. Only the slightly annoying and worrying warning in dmesg is there.

Is this normal and can the warning message be ignored? Is adding those two options in the kernel line and then the additional fixes to get normal sized text in TTYs really the recommended way to handle this? I'm asking because as mentioned above, everything is working fine, apart from that annoying message. Trying to remove it caused actual problems.

My GPU is a GeForce 8800GT.

GRUB's config, nothing changed apart from this line:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet libata.force=norst"

Xorg config:

Section "Module"
    Load           "dbe"
    Load           "extmod"
    Load           "type1"
    Load           "freetype"
    Load           "glx"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    # HorizSync source: edid, VertRefresh source: edid
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "LG Electronics L1953HR"
    HorizSync       30.0 - 83.0
    VertRefresh     56.0 - 75.0
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BoardName      "GeForce 8800 GT"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
#    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "Stereo" "0"
    Option         "nvidiaXineramaInfoOrder" "CRT-0"
    Option         "metamodes" "1280x1024_75 +0+0{ ForceCompositionPipeline = On }"
    Option         "SLI" "Off"
    Option         "MultiGPU" "Off"
    Option         "BaseMosaic" "off"
#    SubSection     "Display"
#        Depth       24
#    EndSubSection
EndSection

Last edited by justasug (2016-11-23 21:20:42)

seth · 2016-11-23 14:24:46

The huge chars are the "desired" result (so to say) of those parameters (or other ways to gain a VGA console)
Using a framebuffer console is not supported by nvidia. You may encounter no problems at all or get a black screen only instead of a desktop. There've been weird crashes and artifacts reported (to some upstream) which could be linked to this. As long as you've no problems, you can ignore the warning - if you get some, first ensure they're not related to this (anything between overlay in GL/video and resolution/VT changing is highly suspicious here)

justasug · 2016-11-23 21:20:29

Thank you for the explanation.
I'll keep using the proprietary drivers and ignore the warning message. At least until I notice any problems.

Arch Linux

#1 2016-11-22 23:22:42

[SOLVED] Nvidia VGA Console warning

#2 2016-11-23 14:24:46

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia VGA Console warning

#3 2016-11-23 21:20:29

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia VGA Console warning

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