Arch Linux

maldus

Member

Registered: 2017-03-20

Posts: 28

How to install an older nvidia driver version

Hello everyone,
I am in the unfortunate situation where backlight control on my laptop has been broken since Nvidia 470 (last working version was 465). I have asked support on their forum and opened an issue for the new nvidia-open Github repo, but I'm not very hopeful.

At this point I'm willing to resort to permanently downgrade the nvidia driver version to 465. I am here to confirm whether my understanding of Arch package management and of the process is correct.

Obviously I can't simply download the relevant package and install it with pacman -U. Rolling back the whole system to the point where 465 was the current version seems unfeasible (and undesirable).

I stumbled upon this  repository; I couldn't find an in depth explanation but it seems to me that the makefile builds the required nvidia module (and dependencies) against my currently installed kernel. Would this work and be sustainable? I would need to recompile and reinstall it every time I update my system, but I'd be happy to if it means having brightness control back.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,104

Re: How to install an older nvidia driver version

Installing a DKMS variant of the driver that automatically rebuilds against new kernel headers is indeed the way to go here, whether you use nvidia-all or the normal packages (nvidia-dkms from "that time" is your friend here) for that is irrelevant.The likely bigger issue you'll have that chances are that the newer kernel is incompatible with a perpetually frozen driver version and you'll likely have to opt for an LTS kernel as well eventually.

FWIW how sure are you this is an nvidia driver regression? There's has been significant work on the kernel backlight stack that migth bite itself with what nvidia is/used to be doing, so you might want to first test the LTS kernel with the newer nvidia package to check whether the backlight work in the kernel is your actual culprit for the issue and not nvidia per se.

Also side info, your card is Pascal and thus not eligible for nvidia-open so trying that is expectedly unfruitful.

Last edited by V1del (2023-02-09 11:29:51)