Black screen with mouse pointer after booting Fedora 41 with old video card

Ask Fedora
1

This is an older PC from 2010. Nvidia GTS 250 graphics card, beefy (for the time) Intel I7-860 with no intel graphics, no TPM.

I installed Fedora 37 (Workstation) a little over two years ago.
I’ve been using the Nouveau driver at 1920x1080 resolution with no issues for several years as I upgraded with no issues to Fedora 38, 39, and 40.
When I upgraded to Fedora 41, the upgrade itself went fine but on the final reboot to complete the Fedora 41 install, things were not good. I got the Fedora splash screen with the spinning circle. Then the screen went black and the mouse pointer appeared in the lower right. Then nothing.

After investigations, I could see that Gnome failed to initiate properly.

Then I found that if I created a Live USB of Fedora 41, booting that failed the same way (so this was apparently a Fedora 41 issue; the upgrade was apparently not relevant to the issue). But if I used the Live USB’s Troubleshooting grub option and selected the “Basic Graphics Mode” Fedora 41 would boot.

But the “Basic Graphics” meant 1024x768 resolution, stretched wide across my monitor - it’s pretty ugly, but with this, can see that Fedora 41 is actually running just fine (other than rendering graphics).

With a little more research I found that I could boot off the hard disk’s upgraded Fedora 41 and, in the grub menu, edit the main startup command to add “nomodeset vga=791” towards the end of the Linux startup command and that booted much like the Troubleshooting “Basic Graphics Mode” choice in the Live CD. Ugly graphics, but functional.

I’ve been running Nouveau since 37 with no issues on that old GTS 250. I’m not a gamer, so I don’t care about trying to use the old Nvidia drivers. They were available three years ago as akmod-nvidia-340xx in RPM Fusion, but they were glitchy back then and I uninstalled them after a couple of days and have used Nouveau ever since, with no issues.

I believe my issue is that Nouveau is doing something different/bad in the Fedora 41 release (but Gnome and Wayland are in this path, too, and could be part of the my issue).
But all I know is that something bad happened trying to get the graphics going.
I’m hoping that it’s an oversight that can be fixed.
Given that my graphics card was released from 2010, it’s easy to see how it could have not been tested.

Does anyone know if Nouveau (and Wayland and Gnome) meant to stop supporting older graphics cards that were fine on Fedora 40? Basically, is my issue an “on purpose” or a “bug?”

Thanks!

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I have the same issue with a nVidia NVS 3100 (GT218) GPU and F41. Wayland did work in F40 when forcing GTK4 to use the “gl” renderer over the “new improved” ngl renderer. The only resolution in my case for F41 has been to disable gdm’s use of Wayland by editing /etc/gdm/custom.conf.

I’m not holding out hope that the nouveau/GTK4/Mesa developers are going to fix this for the old cards.

As far as the the 340 series nVidia rpmfusion drivers go, they have been removed from the F41 rpmfusion repos. A note on the rpmfusion web site indicates they were removed due to incompatibilities with xorg/X11 — and they didn’t support Wayland either.

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Yeah, I figured the Nvidia RPM stuff was gone. Which is OK for my usage anyway.
I was a software dev from 1977 until retirement 5 years ago.
I totally get the old releases are a total pain to support (I did some of that, just on different platforms). But one of linux’s selling points (as I recall?) was that linux runs on older hardware.

I would think/hope that nouveau would somehow be able to handle the basics (like 1920x1080 resolution). I still have hopes… but ya never know until you ask. :slight_smile:

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I think it may go deeper than just nouveau. There’s a boatload of changes in the GTK4 toolkit renderers and the Mesa 3D libraries since F39 anf F40 that gdm and GMOME are built on. (And even Wayland and Mutter compositor).

Reminds me of the old Colossal Cave “adventure” game - a twisty maze of passages.

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OK, that was a fun game. It was 1977 when I first saw it. Good memories! And, I believe you that the twisty mazes could well represent what would need to be chased down to “re-enable” support the older cards with the newer software.

Yeah, I may have to decide to buy a newer video card to appease Fedora.
Microsoft has already said “you’re not bringing that old box to Windows 11” because it has no TPS secure boot, the processor is too old, and the graphics card is too old. Spending $100 to get a newer video card could just be just a short stopgap before Linux also decides that they aren’t happy with the older processor or lack of TPS. That quickly snowballs because a new processor means new motherboard which means new memory.

It might be time to just pull the SSDs out of the box and let this old machine go.

A side thought: If it was an expected result of the upgrade to 41 that older graphics cards will basically kill Fedora’s ability to boot, I kinda wonder why the upgrade code didn’t look at my video card and go “We’re not going to upgrade you to Fedora 41 because your video card is no longer supported. You need to stay on Fedora 40.” That definitely would have saved me some time over the past month. :slight_smile:

Are you doing dev in that area? Do we know if dropping support for older cards was on purpose as opposed to a bug? If that was the official plan, I’ll obviously not push on this issue. But If it was on purpose, it seems like there could have been something in a readme or in the release notes that says something about dropping support for whatever class of older videocards. The RPM Fusion notes to say that the older video drivers are not supported. But I wasn’t using them anyway.

Perhaps there should be a note about what nouveau supports in Fedora 41? Global docs for nouveau (e.g., in Wikipedia) continue to say that nouveau supports Tesla GPUs which includes my old GTS 250. And yeah, I know Wikipedia isn’t likely the official documentation for nouveau.

I guess someone still might respond here that “your card should still work… let me look at the code…” But I’m starting to doubt it. :slight_smile:

Thanks, Paul!

6

It may be possible to use those older GPUs with F41 if you do the following.

  1. Edit the /etc/environment file and add a line that reads GSK_RENDERER=gl.
  2. After saving that file reboot and log back in.

The newer kernels will not support the older nvdia driver version 340 which is the required nvidia driver for that old hardware. However nouveau may be able to do so with that environment variable set.

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I have filed this issue as a bug a few weeks ago. No resolution.

While this usually works, it doesn’t for this specific use case. It seems that very old Nvidia graphics cards are not supported anymore on GNOME 47.

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You guys are just full of good news for me. I’ll try the GSK_RENDERER=gl (without expecting much) and I’ll let you guys know how that goes.

In the meantime, my nephew saw my post here or in reddit and volunteered to give me an old card he’s got laying around. So that’s a possibility.

My bin of old video cards are from the late '90s through 2006 (and thus, more useless than my GTS 250 - heh). My ancient video cards are actually in a box to be recycled but I just haven’t taken them in yet.

One other thought: would the Fedora KDE Plasma spin possibly avoid the Nvidia “excitement”? I could try that.

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It was worth a try, but adding GSK_RENDERER=gl to the /etc/environment file didn’t make any visible changes on the reboot… still just a black screen with mouse pointer…

And to be clear, I probably should have put a smiley after my “You guys are just full of good news for me” comment. I was smiling as I made my “full of good news” comment and I definitely appreciate the suggestions.

So, I’ll probably make a Live USB of the Fedora KDE Plasma ISO and boot it on my old box. It might have different underpinnings than Wayland and mutter so it seems like it might not run into the same issues as Fedora Workstation. Easy to try.

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OK, wow. The Fedora 41 KDE Plasma spin boots up just fine. Full 1920x1080 on the monitor. It’s using nouveau but not using wayland or mutter. The video underpinnings of the KDE Plasma spin still support my old GTS 250 card.

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As long as KDE Plasma is using X11, that’s not surprising. It appears that GNOME 47/Wayland/Mutter that’s the problem. Something has changed that keeps that combination from working from F40. I found that forcing gdm (and GNOME) back to using X11 still works with F41.

@computersavvy rightly noted in my thread on my problem (F41/Wayland/nouveau/NVS3100M combo fails to display GDM login screen) that the 340 series nVidia drivers that supported my card in F40 and earlier don’t support Wayland.

What I’ve not been able to get an authoritative answer to is the question of the nouveau driver supporting Wayland. If it does, are there any hardware dependencies that go along with it.l

If nouveau is supposed to support Wayland with our older nVidia GPUs, then this certainly is a bug. And if not, then you’re right that some note should be made for that.

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Yes, I meant to say that on my system I have also managed to boot into a live session with KDE Plasma spin.

If you would like to follow the developments with GNOME, there is a way to access a graphical session: enter a text console, log in, and from there startx. Not a pleasant workaround though.

13

Just for ha-ha’s I added the KDE desktop to my existing F41 Workstation (GNOME) (dnf install @kde-desktop) and switched the login from gdm to sddm. (systemctl disable gdm.service; systemctl enable sddm.service; reboot)

The sddm login comes up fine. Login to my account works fine. Also started a terminal to check which graphics environment was active and… lo and behold… it’s Wayland.

I’m going to be sticking with Plasma for a while.

1 Like
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Rember that when using an nvidia gpu you are limited in performance without using the nvidia drivers
The nouveau driver does not support hardware acceleration on the gpu so the CPU is tasked with graphics rendering which is a serious performance issue.

There are other issues with the nvidia gpus as well.
If your GPU is older than about the 1000 series you must use a driver version 470 or older and those do not support wayland.
They have rolled out a newer open source nvidia driver that works with nouveau to support hardware acceleration but that is limited to the 3000 and 4000 series cards

I have several systems with nvidia cards ranging from 1050 and 1650 thru 3050 and all seem to work well with the latest (proprietary) nvidia drivers from rpmfusion.

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Yeah, I know… I’ve been using nouveau for the last two years. My video card requires the 340xx drivers. I don’t game with that box… I mean, with drivers on Windows 10, it’d be fine for running games from 2009. I remember running Battlefield 1942 on it. But these days, I use that box mostly as a backup for my mini PC… I do web browsing and Libre Office and it has SSDs with backups of photos and videos. Nouveau is good enough for the stuff I do there. Thanks for the heads up, though.