I am running Fedora 40 KDE using Wayland and an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060. Everything was running great until all the kernel updates that followed 6.8.7. Since then, every single kernel causes a black screen after the GRUB menu. The system is not frozen, as far as I know, as the keyboard’s num/caps/scroll lock keys still work. I am basically stuck on 6.8.7, which is infuriating, as I specifically chose Fedora for new kernels and regular updates. My system is running BTRFS and is encrypted with LUKS.
What I have tried:
Disabled Fast Boot (off by default).
Disabled Secure Boot (off by default).
Disabled iGPU.
Slowly typing in my LUKS password at the black screen, hoping it will progress SDDM.
Waiting 20+ minutes at the black screen.
Try to access a tty with the CTRL+F keys. Can’t get to any of them.
journalctl looks normal to me except for a wall of text related to PipeWire.
I changed the GRUB config, removing rhgb and changing quiet to noquiet, and was able to boot. I hit enter after 20 seconds to bring up the LUKS prompt, since nothing was happening. There were no errors in GRUB prior to this, it just listed the connected USB devices. No errors in systemd after entering LUKS password.
The only thing I can think of is that the NVIDIA drivers are being loaded before LUKS.
I don’t use LUKS at all (never have any need) so I don’t know what the normal modus operandi is for it. Hopefully someone with experience of what is normally does and looks like can chime in.
I’m pleased you get to be able to boot a newer kernel; shows there’s nothing inherently wrong with the installation; all we need to do now is work out what the root cause is!
One thing that has been noticed with the newer 6.11 kernels is that sometimes it is necessary to have a special environment variable to manage the black screen issue.
There are several threads about that.
The fix for many is to edit the /etc/environment file and insert a line GSK_RENDERER=nglthen reboot.
