[SOLVED] Nvidia drivers causing X to blackscreen

Lawg · 2023-03-15 17:30:27

Hello everyone! The following is from a previous reddit post I made in an attempt to solve the issue:
I'm having a lot of trouble with booting into my system, and I can only assume it has something to do with my Nvidia drivers or kernel modules not playing nicely with them. What's the issue exactly:

Upon booting (after working fine for awhile) I get past the grub screen, see "Starting systemd-udevd version 253.1-3-arch," as well as "/dev/sdc2: clean..." number of files and blocks etc.
after that screen, my display simply goes black. It doesn't turn off, just goes black and the display manager never appears. I'm able to switch with ctrl+alt+F2-12 (F1 is the location of the black screen), though none of these options actually give my a tty they only show the "starting systemd-udevd" text

What i've already tried:
After chrooting in from a live install, I've entirely reinstalled the linux kernel, headers, firmware, nvidia, replaced nvidia with nvidia-dkms, added the nvidia module to mkinitcpio.conf and ran "mkinitcpio -P," even created a pacman hook to regenerate the initramfs after an nvidia driver change and reinstalled said driver, regenerated the grub config. I'm lost at this point as none of these have fixed the issue.

It should also be noted that upon running "modprobe nvidia" or "modprobe nvidia-dkms" in the chroot environment simply returns "modprobe FATAL: Module nvidia not found in directory /lib/modules" and i'm assuming this is pointing towards the culprit.

also: what's with there not being any TTy's available in F2-F12? I've just become extremely confused at this point and am gonna need some external help. Thanks in advance for your time!

edit: for more info about hardware and system info since it slipped my mind while writing:

I am on a vanilla arch install on the latest kernel, with a 2070 super GPU (which has been giving me issues on linux for quite some time now)
-----------
With that being said, the most recent progress i've made involved blacklisting my iGPU's drivers from loading, which actually allowed me to at least be able to get into a tty on boot! i no longer need to be in a chroot environment. However, I still cannot use "startx". When I do, i'm only greeted with a black screen with my monitor still on.
I've also since re-replaced nvidia-dkms with the standard nvidia package, and removed my previous nvidia-settings file since I read that can also cause this issue after saving monitor settings. I've used the command to generate an Xorg configuration for nvidia as well, to no avail. Any tips would be much appreciated!!

For those that wish to see logs, here are some:
Journalctl log: https://rentry.co/gekms
/var/log/Xorg.0.log: https://rentry.co/ep73q

Last edited by Lawg (2023-03-16 16:34:53)

jonno2002 · 2023-03-15 23:58:32

[ 5.416] () Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"

remove that file and try again

Lawg · 2023-03-16 00:47:24

wow it was THAT simple?! Thank you so much! It never occurred to me that that could be the problem, but it works like magic! How can I mark this issue as solved? also, how can I ensure that this never happens again? Do I need to be careful about changing things in nvidia-settings, or will it just work from now on now that the file has been removed? once again, thank you very much for your help, I can't believe the fix was that simple.

jonno2002 · 2023-03-16 03:25:12

edit the title of your original post and prepend "[SOLVED]"
as for the condig thing, just dont run nvidia-xconfig EVER, the nvidia-settings is saved under ~/.nvidia-settings-rc

seth · 2023-03-16 07:42:54

You've an https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus setup and if you want to configure it in specific ways, that's the page to read (and its sublinks)
The default behavior will be the prime setup (ie. you're now running on the IGP and can "prime-run superturboturkeypuncher³" to run games on the nvidia chip (nvidia-prime package, the script just sets some environment variables)

The autoconfig tools won't produce anything really useful here and from your Xorg log, you also tried to use the IGP on the nvidia driver.

~/.nvidia-settings-rc would have to be explicitly loaded if you want to use it to configure the nvidia GPU w/ the session start, but that's usually not required.
You can perfectly fine set parameters for the nvidia driver via xorg.conf.d drop-ins, just writing a static server config is a *really* bad idea.

Lawg · 2023-03-16 16:35:32

I see. I appreciate the resource and information guys, truly, thank you sm for your help. Marked as solved

Arch Linux

#1 2023-03-15 17:30:27

[SOLVED] Nvidia drivers causing X to blackscreen

#2 2023-03-15 23:58:32

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia drivers causing X to blackscreen

#3 2023-03-16 00:47:24

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia drivers causing X to blackscreen

#4 2023-03-16 03:25:12

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia drivers causing X to blackscreen

#5 2023-03-16 07:42:54

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia drivers causing X to blackscreen

#6 2023-03-16 16:35:32

Re: [SOLVED] Nvidia drivers causing X to blackscreen

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