Fedora 43/Gnome/Wayland does not load driver for my GeForce GT730 card

Ask Fedora
1

I rarely use the GUI on my Fedora 43 workstation, except to work on my photos with digiKam, and after my recent hardware upgrade/system rebuild in December, digiKam could not read the database that was created before the rebuild. I had enough other issues to work on, so I set it aside, and for the next 10 weeks, I only logged in via SSH from my Windows desktop.

Now I was coming back to see if the database compatibility issue had been resolved, but I only get a dark screen, even during boot. But that last part could be because the BIOS picks the built-in GPU over the 4K add-in card.

Here are some salient diagnostic bits:

[lars@cleo ~]$ sudo lsmod | grep -iE “nouveau|nvidia”
nouveau 4005888 0
drm_ttm_helper 20480 1 nouveau
gpu_sched 69632 1 nouveau
drm_gpuvm 57344 1 nouveau
drm_exec 12288 2 drm_gpuvm,nouveau
mxm_wmi 12288 1 nouveau
i2c_algo_bit 20480 2 i915,nouveau
ttm 135168 3 drm_ttm_helper,i915,nouveau
drm_display_helper 344064 2 i915,nouveau
video 81920 3 dell_wmi,i915,nouveau
wmi 32768 11 dell_wmi_sysman,video,intel_wmi_thunderbolt,dell_wmi,dell_wmi_aio,wmi_bmof,dell_smm_hwmon,dell_smbios,dell_wmi_descriptor,mxm_wmi,nouveau
[lars@cleo ~]$ sudo lshw -C video
*-display UNCLAIMED
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GK208B [GeForce GT 730]
vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: a1
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller cap_list
configuration: latency=0
resources: memory:9b000000-9bffffff memory:90000000-97ffffff memory:98000000-99ffffff ioport:3000(size=128) memory:9c000000-9c07ffff
*-display
description: Display controller
product: CoffeeLake-S GT2 [UHD Graphics 630]
vendor: Intel Corporation
physical id: 2
bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33MHz
capabilities: pciexpress msi pm bus_master cap_list
configuration: driver=i915 latency=0
resources: irq:144 memory:9a000000-9affffff memory:80000000-8fffffff ioport:4000(size=64)
[lars@cleo ~]$ lspci | grep -e 3D
[lars@cleo ~]$ rpm -qa | grep nvidia
nvidia-gpu-firmware-20260309-1.fc43.noarch
[lars@cleo ~]$ ls /etc/yum.repos.d
_copr:copr.fedorainfracloud.org:phracek:PyCharm.repo google-chrome.repo rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.repo
fedora-cisco-openh264.repo plex.repo rpmfusion-nonfree.repo
fedora.repo rpmfusion-free.repo rpmfusion-nonfree-steam.repo
fedora-updates.repo rpmfusion-free-updates.repo rpmfusion-nonfree-updates.repo
fedora-updates-testing.repo rpmfusion-free-updates-testing.repo rpmfusion-nonfree-updates-testing.repo
[lars@cleo ~]$

As you can see, I have the relevant rpmfusion repos enabled, I have the driver, but it does not load, leaving the card “UNCLAIMED”.

What is happening, and how do I resolve it?

2

Your rpm -qa shows you don’t have the Nvidia proprietary driver - only the firmware which is used by Nouveau.

For the GT730, there is an available driver, but it’s the legacy 470 driver which doesn’t support Wayland.

1 Like
3

Ok, sad to hear that, since X11 seems to be going away in Fedora.

Or is it viable to switch to X11? Does GNOME work on an X11 base?

4

Cinnamon is probably your best bet.

Or i3 WM if you’re fairly technical.

5

Anyway, stepping back, nouveau supports Wayland on this card, so the lack of a proprietary driver isn’t the cause of the issue.

Do you literally see nothing at all on your screen? Does anything appear when the BIOS starts up, or at GRUB time?

And does journalctl show anything suspicious for the boots that you did with a monitor connected?

6

The real answer seems to be: Nvidia GeForce GT730 is now considered to be an “old and obsolete” GPU, which is not supported under Wayland, so when GNOME stopped supporting X11, it stopped working.

I bought a newer card (GeForce 900 series) and when I replaced the 730 with the 940, everything just worked as it should.

7

Please note that the 940 GPU will also no longer be supported by the newest (soon to be available) nvidia driver (version 595) when f44 is released. It will be necessary to remain on the (soon to be legacy) 580 drivers to have nvidia support with wayland for that GPU.

According to nvidia all GPUs older than the 1600 series will be dropped from support with the 595 drivers.

1 Like
8

That was basically what you said about the 730, and it did not work, so I assume that means that the 940 will fail in the same way. I do not like to have to buy another NVIDIA card every couple of months.

So … what is an affordable “current” NVIDIA GPU that will remain supported for a while?

Or what is an affordable GPU from someone else, that will remain supported by Gnome/Wayland?

One of the attractions of Linux is that it remains able to run even on slightly older systems. That may still be true for headless servers, but it seems that GPUs are the new enforcement method for “You have to buy a new one every 4 years (or sooner).

9

AMD or Intel.

The 730 is from 2012, but still thats not really that long ago. The 740 is 2014.

10

In my experience, Nouveau should be good with old GPUs like the GT 730, wayland included, but some kernel versions introduce driver bugs that could be causing this. What kernel version are you on? Did you try upgrading it?

Depends on where you are and what is considered “affordable”.

A key consideration when choosing a GPU is what you’re aiming to use it for. e.g. Why not just use the built in iGPU that you already have? Do you just need more display ports? Need CUDA? Gaming? Etc..

11

This is not true.

As stated above, the newest-- soon to be released for fedora – nvidia driver will support all nvidia devices as old as the 1600 series. The 1650 was released in 2019 and is expected to be supported for some time yet. The 940 which you just bought was released in 2016 and they are just now dropping support in the newest drivers (10 years), but it will still be supported by the 580 drivers.

As I understand it, rpmfusion intends to keep the 580 drivers supported by making the packages legacy with 580xx in the name so it does not automatically get updated for those who need to continue support for older GPUs (the 900 and 1000 series).

This means you do not have to panic and immediately replace the 940 GPU since the drivers will remain available to support it for a considerable time period. Nvidia directly supported it with the newest drivers for 10 years, and it will still have support with the 580 driver version for quite some time.

12

That is kind of true. But it has just a couple years of official support at this point, after which time it becomes anyone’s guess if there will be some kernel incompatibility with the unmaintained drivers a few years down the road. Not to mention that there will not be any security fixes after a couple years.

Personally, I would return it if that is an option. But if not, then enjoy the new GPU while you save money for something more modern and longer-supported, I suppose.

13

I understand the dilemma.

I have 2 GTX 1050 GPUs that I had installed in one system and with the upcoming change of driver they were to lose support just like the 940. I decided to open the piggy bank and purchased an RTX 3050 since I knew it would be supported for longer than I will have that machine.

It is important to understand that linux allows use of systems much longer than they are supported by the big boys (Microsoft & Apple) but that every system at some point reaches the age of obsolescence where the hardware is no longer able to be supported. This is because as systems age and newer hardware is released the focus is always on supporting the new systems. Eventually the older hardware in use becomes such a small percentage of the total hardware in use it is no longer financially feasible for anyone to continue support.

14

You can still use the the new card for a while, but you will have to remain on the 580.xx.x Driver, This was also the case for several generations prior where the 370.xx.x & 490.xx.x drivers were supported for a long time. The Nvidia GPU’s from these generations are all over 10/15+yrs old. The old Nouveu driver would “work“ for some of these old cards, but the GTX7xx generation showed a change in firmware in which it’s almost necessary to have the Proprietary driver.

TBF you did go from a card that was 15yrs old to a card that was 12yrs old. If you want longer support, you should look into purchasing an AMD GPU or the Intel Xe GPU’s. Open source drivers and still getting support today (The R9 79xx series, R9 2XX series + all 12+yrs old).

The Nvidia 580.xx.xx will go on for some time, but it’s best to go with GPU’s Nvidia is committed to supporting for a while. Also, there is an opensource driver being worked on called nova-core maybe that will help. . .

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15

What is the procedure for swapping in the older driver?

And do I need to repeat that on a Fedora version upgrade?

  • Lars Poulsen
16

Likely, RPMFusion will create new packages called akmod-nvidia-580xx and so on (as per the precedent for 390xx and 470xx). You would install those instead of akmod-nvidia etc.

No, shouldn’t be necessary. Once you have the ...580xx packages, nothing is going to try to update those to the “latest” drivers.

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