After upgrading to F41, black screen instead of login screen if using Wayland

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Hello everyone. I see that there are several topics similar to this one. However, as far as I have seen, they are all related to Nvidia drivers, which I don’t use.

My first Fedora release was F40 with GNOME. I had to tinker a bit with the Nvidia drivers, as I currently have a really old card - a GeForce 210, from 2009. Eventually, after several kernel updates, I was able to ditch Nvidia’s proprietary drivers and get F40/GNOME working with both Wayland and Nouveau drivers. Performance was excellent. The only fixes I had to make were:

  1. Create a .sh file (with whatever name you want) in /etc/profile.d/.
  2. Add export GSK_RENDERER=cairo.

Without this file I would get a black screen with a visible cursor instead of the login screen after the Fedora Buffering logo.

Fast forward to me upgrading to F41, and I have this exact problem again, whether I’m using this fix or not. The only solution I have found is to switch to X11:

  1. Open /etc/gdm/custom.conf.
  2. Uncomment the line WaylandEnable=false.
  3. Right after that, add DefaultSession=gnome-xorg.desktop.

This brings back the login screen and lets me log into the desktop normally, but the performance is terrible (e.g. when watching Youtube videos). I would very much like to use Wayland and the Nouveau drivers as I used to, because that configuration hit the sweet spot of using the latest FOSS software, not having to deal with Nvidia repos and driver setup, and having excellent performance. I think in the end I’d rather go back to F40 than use Nvidia drivers, but I’m willing to try some workarounds first. I’m using a single monitor.

Things I have tried so far:

  • Any combination (on/off) of the two fixes above.
  • Adding GSK_RENDERER=gl to /etc/enviroment (and removing the .sh file from profile.d). It makes no difference.
  • Check the “Mouse keys” accessibility setting that I’ve seen mentioned in other posts (it’s off in my case).

I just don’t understand why whatever F40 had that made my system work properly is not present in F41. Has my card lost support in F41? Anyway, if anyone could provide some guidance or ideas as to what fix I could try, I would appreciate it.

Thanks in advance.

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I’m afraid that someone did something upstream that breaks GNOME47/Wayland/nouveau in F41 for these old nVidia cards (Mine is a NVS3100M (GT218M) and I’m seeing the same thing). Whether that’s intentional or accidental is to be determined.

This smells like a bug report but I’m not sure what to file the bug report against - there are way too many moving parts under the hood that could be the culprit.

At first, I disabled Wayland and went back to X11. The other thing I tried was switching my DE to KDE Plasma 6. So far it’s working for me.

The issue IMO is buried in the GNOME/GTK4/Mesa underpinnings when running with Wayland on these old cards. GTK4 in particular has really been pushing their new renderers (ngl in F40 and vulkan in f41) which might be giving the Mesa 3D libraries and nouveau driver headaches.

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I have reported this issue with Fedora during final RC tests, but being an upstream issue, I’m afraid there’s nothing that Fedora can do about it.

I didn’t take the time to report upstream, since the issue only applies to rather old graphics cards, and probably won’t be considered putting the effort to fix/maintain such old hardware.

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@perockwell I checked your profile and saw at least two topics (one yours) identical to mine, somehow I missed them, thanks for the heads up. As you say, it would be nice to have some “closure” and know for sure whether it’s intentional or a bug.

New Mesa packages are available. However, they don’t seem to fix the issue:

mesa-dri-drivers                x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates 143.1 MiB
  replacing mesa-dri-drivers    x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates 143.1 MiB
mesa-filesystem                 x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates   3.6 KiB
  replacing mesa-filesystem     x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates   3.6 KiB
mesa-libEGL                     x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates 340.2 KiB
  replacing mesa-libEGL         x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates 340.2 KiB
mesa-libGL                      x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates 457.8 KiB
  replacing mesa-libGL          x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates 457.8 KiB
mesa-libgbm                     x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates  69.3 KiB
  replacing mesa-libgbm         x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates  69.3 KiB
mesa-libglapi                   x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates 172.4 KiB
  replacing mesa-libglapi       x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates 172.5 KiB
mesa-va-drivers                 x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates  92.0   B
  replacing mesa-va-drivers     x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates  92.0   B
mesa-vulkan-drivers             x86_64 24.2.8-1.fc41           updates 100.3 MiB
  replacing mesa-vulkan-drivers x86_64 24.2.7-1.fc41           updates  99.1 MiB

@tqcharm Thank you for taking your time making a report. Surely a naive question, but is it really that complicated to keep something that was already working with F40? It also seems interesting to make old hardward compatible with Wayland in order to make a case in favour of it against X11.

All in all, I feel like I will end up downgrading to F40. Maybe even use it as an opportunity to try other distros or desktop environments.

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I was on my way to the GNOME forums to ask something, but I will add it here in case it’s relevant.

Yesterday I tried this to reset the GNOME settings. It didn’t work for me, so I tried to restore my original settings by removing the newly generated file and restoring the .bak file. I did this by simply renaming the file and removing the .bak extension. However, my old settings were NOT restored and I currently have the default settings.

As I have no idea about dconf, I must have done something wrong. I understand that the $HOME/.config/dconf/user file is a binary database and I tried to load it using dconf. I get the following error:

user@fedora:~$ cd .config/dconf/
user@fedora:~/.config/dconf$ dconf load / < user
error: Key file contains line “GVariantrg.gnome.fonts.desktop” which is not a key-value pair, group, or comment

Since there are reports of accessibility settings messing with the ability to use Wayland, could this “GVariantrg.gnome.fonts.desktop” thing be related to our problem?

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I guess maintaining old hardware always requires additional efforts, when trying to develop new features that match the capabilities of newer hardware. Given the limited resources, at some point the additional efforts are not worth it. This seems to be even more of an issue here, where the open-source nouveau drivers, (reverse-)engineered to work with proprietary graphics, are involved.

The KDE editions of Fedora 41 don’t seem to have this issue. You can check that by booting into a live session.

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That shouldn’t be related to the current issue, given that the dconf databases are user-specific, whereas in our issue the login screen is not even reached, so no loading of user-specific settings.

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After multiple attempts to upgrade a Mac Pro (2013) from Fedora 39 I was finally able to make it work with your fix by editing the custom.conf file! I have tried multiple times to upgrade to Fedora 40 and 41 since the first of December with same results… The dreaded black screen. Fortunately this is not my main system but have been determined to get this to work so I have a backup system and Fedora 39 no longer is supported. Not getting performance issues that you have, could be due to different graphics cards. After many hours searching these forums and the web I found your post - Thank you!

Note: During my many upgrade attempts and fresh installs the only distro that worked without the black screen issue was Fedora 41 KDE Plasma? So if this spin works why not standard Fedora?

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Hi @ckpiv and welcome to the :fedora: discussion forums.

As noted above, this seems to be an issue related to GNOME/GTK4 and its technologies, and is encountered when loading GDM.

Fedora KDE spin not only uses KDE, but also a different display manager (SSDM instead of GDM).

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In my case (nouveau, card GT218, F40 GNOME works, F41 GNOME shows blank screen with mouse) I was able to get some debug right before errors from kernel.

I added to /etc/environment

MUTTER_VERBOSE=1
MUTTER_DEBUG=render,kms

And restarted GDM with systemctl restart gdm. Then journalctl -b
revealed something interesting:

gnome-shell[2325]: BACKEND: cogl_onscreen_swap_buffers (onscreen: 0x55782513aed0)
kernel: nouveau 0000:06:00.0: gr: DATA_ERROR 00000012 [RT_LINEAR_WITH_ZETA]
kernel: nouveau 0000:06:00.0: gr: 00100000 [] ch 2 [003fa80000 gnome-shell[2325]] subc 3 class 8597 mthd 0d78 data 00000004
kernel: nouveau 0000:06:00.0: gr: DATA_ERROR 00000012 [RT_LINEAR_WITH_ZETA]
kernel: nouveau 0000:06:00.0: gr: 00100000 [] ch 2 [003fa80000 gnome-shell[2325]] subc 3 class 8597 mthd 0d78 data 00000004
kernel: nouveau 0000:06:00.0: gr: DATA_ERROR 00000012 [RT_LINEAR_WITH_ZETA]
kernel: nouveau 0000:06:00.0: gr: 00100000 [] ch 2 [003fa80000 gnome-shell[2325]] subc 3 class 8597 mthd 0d78 data 00000004

These errors come from kernel-6.12.8/linux-6.12.8-200.fc41.x86_64/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nvkm/engine/gr/nv50.c - when card reports some error via interrupt.

To me it seems that trivial buffer swap fails to work so we see only initial blank screen(?).

Note that cogl functions are now part of mutter package, some basic info is there Cogl.Onscreen.swap_buffers_with_damage

But I need to dig deeper to better understand what happens under hood…

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Yeah, GNOME in F41 broke when using Wayland with the nouveau driver and very old nVidia cards (such as the GT218 that you have). I have an old Dell laptop with the same graphics card.

Looks like the GNOME/Mesa/GTK4 developers are no longer interested in supporting our old hardware. You may have to revert back to using Xorg/X11 with GNOME (by editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf and uncommenting the DisableWayand setting) or install the KDE components, switch to sddm as the greeter, and run Plasma as your desktop environment.

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You’ll need these packages installed on F41 Workstation for Xorg sessions to work (thread):

sudo dnf install gnome-session-xsession xorg-x11-drivers setxkbmap xhost xmodmap xorg-x11-xauth xorg-x11-xinit xrdb

And this disables Wayland globally:

sudo sed -i 's/'#WaylandEnable=false'/'WaylandEnable=false'/g' '/etc/gdm/custom.conf'
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Thanks for the update. Your advice is spot on – those packages are probably already there if you’ve upgraded from F40 to F41, but it’s not a bad idea to check to see
if they’re there in any case. And thanks for the
correction on the uncomment - I had misremembered the WaylandEnable line…

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