Fresh install on desktop unusable after installing Nvidia drivers

Hello! After trying the Fedora experience on my old laptop for a while, I finally decided to dual boot Fedora KDE on my main desktop alongside Windows.
The installation went smoothly and everything was working fine with the nouveau driver, but after installing the proprietary Nvidia drivers as instructed in the RPM Fusion Docs, the system started acting all choppy and sluggish. Even the animation to find the cursor is lagging badly. It’s almost like the CPU (without iGPU) is doing all the work.

I tried reinstalling the drivers with the following commands, but with no avail:

sudo dnf reinstall kernel kernel-modules-core kernel-modules-extras akmod-nvidia`
sudo akmods --force --rebuild
sudo dracut -f --regenerate-all

Since it was a fresh install, I even tried a full reinstall, but I got to the same point the next boot after the installation of the drivers (of course I updated all the packages and rebooted before proceeding).

Another strange thing I noticed is that the system detected a third dummy monitor Unknown-1 (1024x768). This persisted even after a reboot of the system, and it actually set itself as primary, giving me some trouble on how to get into the settings to disable it.


Since there are many posts regarding issues with the Nvidia drivers, I already gathered the info that is often asked in these cases.

Secure Boot is enabled, and I followed the guide on how to deal with it.

sudo dmesg | grep -i secure
[    0.000000] secureboot: Secure boot enabled
[    0.000000] Kernel is locked down from EFI Secure Boot mode; see man kernel_lockdown.7
[    0.003282] secureboot: Secure boot enabled

I thought that maybe I had both nouveau and nvidia modules loaded at the same time, but it doesn’t look like it.

lspci -k | grep -A 2 -i 'vga'
2b:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation AD104 [GeForce RTX 4070] (rev a1)
        Subsystem: NVIDIA Corporation Device 17ff
        Kernel driver in use: nvidia
lsmod | grep -iE 'nouveau|nvidia'
nvidia_drm            135168  34
nvidia_modeset       1617920  3 nvidia_drm
nvidia_uvm           6815744  0
nvidia              61018112  40 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_modeset
video                  81920  1 nvidia_modeset

Here are some logs from dmesg:

sudo dmesg | grep -iE 'nouveau|nvidia|secure'
[    0.000000] Command line: BOOT_IMAGE=(hd2,gpt2)/vmlinuz-6.11.3-200.fc40.x86_64 root=UUID=2ab9243b-270b-4fef-9cf3-54608140af27 ro rootflags=subvol=root rhgb quiet rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau
[    0.000000] secureboot: Secure boot enabled
[    0.000000] Kernel is locked down from EFI Secure Boot mode; see man kernel_lockdown.7
[    0.003282] secureboot: Secure boot enabled
[    0.035938] Kernel command line: BOOT_IMAGE=(hd2,gpt2)/vmlinuz-6.11.3-200.fc40.x86_64 root=UUID=2ab9243b-270b-4fef-9cf3-54608140af27 ro rootflags=subvol=root rhgb quiet rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau
[    5.212863] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=3 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:2b:00.1/sound/card0/input11
[    5.212922] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=7 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:2b:00.1/sound/card0/input12
[    5.212978] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=8 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:2b:00.1/sound/card0/input13
[    5.213030] input: HDA NVidia HDMI/DP,pcm=9 as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:03.1/0000:2b:00.1/sound/card0/input14
[    5.817154] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[    5.817159] nvidia: module license 'NVIDIA' taints kernel.
[    5.817163] nvidia: module license taints kernel.
[    6.183318] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 234
[    6.184569] nvidia 0000:2b:00.0: vgaarb: VGA decodes changed: olddecodes=io+mem,decodes=none:owns=none
[    6.234281] NVRM: loading NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module  555.58.02  Tue Jun 25 01:39:15 UTC 2024
[    6.290411] nvidia_uvm: module uses symbols nvUvmInterfaceDisableAccessCntr from proprietary module nvidia, inheriting taint.
[    6.390371] nvidia-uvm: Loaded the UVM driver, major device number 510.
[    6.432578] nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA Kernel Mode Setting Driver for UNIX platforms  555.58.02  Tue Jun 25 01:10:21 UTC 2024
[    6.438147] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00002b00] Loading driver
[    7.904747] [drm] Initialized nvidia-drm 0.0.0 for 0000:2b:00.0 on minor 1
[   58.756477] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00002b00] Framebuffer memory not appropriate for scanout
[   58.756611] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00002b00] Framebuffer memory not appropriate for scanout
[   66.760914] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00002b00] Framebuffer memory not appropriate for scanout
[   66.761054] [drm] [nvidia-drm] [GPU ID 0x00002b00] Framebuffer memory not appropriate for scanout

And finally, this is my system info:

inxi -Fzxx
System:
  Kernel: 6.11.3-200.fc40.x86_64 arch: x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc
    v: 2.41-37.fc40
  Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.2.0 tk: Qt v: N/A wm: kwin_wayland dm: SDDM
    Distro: Fedora Linux 40 (KDE Plasma)
Machine:
  Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: MPG B550 GAMING PLUS (MS-7C56) v: 1.0
    serial: <superuser required> UEFI: American Megatrends LLC. v: 1.I0
    date: 07/13/2024
CPU:
  Info: 12-core model: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X bits: 64 type: MT MCP arch: Zen 3+
    rev: 2 cache: L1: 768 KiB L2: 6 MiB L3: 64 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 550 min/max: 550/4951 boost: enabled cores: 1: 550
    2: 550 3: 550 4: 550 5: 550 6: 550 7: 550 8: 550 9: 550 10: 550 11: 550
    12: 550 13: 550 14: 550 15: 550 16: 550 17: 550 18: 550 19: 550 20: 550
    21: 550 22: 550 23: 550 24: 550 bogomips: 177601
  Flags: avx avx2 ht lm nx pae sse sse2 sse3 sse4_1 sse4_2 sse4a ssse3 svm
Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA AD104 [GeForce RTX 4070] driver: nvidia v: 555.58.02
    arch: Lovelace pcie: speed: 5 GT/s lanes: 16 ports: active: none
    off: DP-1,HDMI-A-1 empty: DP-2,DP-3 bus-ID: 2b:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:2786
  Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.20.14 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.3
    compositor: kwin_wayland driver: N/A d-rect: 3968x2232 display-ID: 0
  Monitor-1: DP-1 pos: top-right res: 2048x1152 size: N/A
  Monitor-2: HDMI-A-1 pos: bottom-l res: 1920x1080 size: N/A
  API: EGL v: 1.5 platforms: device: 0 drv: nvidia device: 2 drv: swrast
    surfaceless: drv: nvidia wayland: drv: swrast x11: drv: swrast
    inactive: gbm,device-1
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: mesa v: 24.1.7 glx-v: 1.4
    direct-render: yes renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 18.1.6 256 bits)
    device-ID: ffffffff:ffffffff display-ID: :0.0
  API: Vulkan v: 1.3.290 surfaces: xcb,xlib,wayland device: 0
    type: discrete-gpu driver: N/A device-ID: 10de:2786 device: 1 type: cpu
    driver: N/A device-ID: 10005:0000
Audio:
  Device-1: NVIDIA AD104 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel
    pcie: speed: 16 GT/s lanes: 16 bus-ID: 2b:00.1 chip-ID: 10de:22bc
  Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] Starship/Matisse HD Audio
    vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: snd_hda_intel v: kernel pcie: speed: 16 GT/s
    lanes: 16 bus-ID: 2d:00.4 chip-ID: 1022:1487
  Device-3: Samson Meteor condenser microphone
    driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB rev: 1.1 speed: 12 Mb/s
    lanes: 1 bus-ID: 3-3:2 chip-ID: 17a0:0310
  API: ALSA v: k6.11.3-200.fc40.x86_64 status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.0.8 status: active with: 1: pipewire-pulse
    status: active 2: wireplumber status: active 3: pipewire-alsa type: plugin
    4: pw-jack type: plugin
Network:
  Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
    vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: r8169 v: kernel pcie: speed: 2.5 GT/s
    lanes: 1 port: f000 bus-ID: 2a:00.0 chip-ID: 10ec:8168
  IF: enp42s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: <filter>
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 3.18 TiB used: 5.85 GiB (0.2%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Western Digital model: WD BLACK SN850X HS
    1000GB size: 931.51 GiB speed: 63.2 Gb/s lanes: 4 serial: <filter>
    temp: 46.9 C
  ID-2: /dev/nvme1n1 vendor: Samsung model: SSD 970 EVO Plus 500GB
    size: 465.76 GiB speed: 31.6 Gb/s lanes: 4 serial: <filter> temp: 43.9 C
  ID-3: /dev/sda vendor: Seagate model: ST2000DM008-2FR102 size: 1.82 TiB
    speed: 6.0 Gb/s serial: <filter>
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 464.17 GiB used: 5.48 GiB (1.2%) fs: btrfs dev: /dev/nvme1n1p3
  ID-2: /boot size: 973.4 MiB used: 366.2 MiB (37.6%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme1n1p2
  ID-3: /boot/efi size: 598.8 MiB used: 19 MiB (3.2%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme1n1p1
  ID-4: /home size: 464.17 GiB used: 5.48 GiB (1.2%) fs: btrfs
    dev: /dev/nvme1n1p3
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: zram size: 8 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) priority: 100
    dev: /dev/zram0
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 53.8 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A
Info:
  Memory: total: 32 GiB available: 31.26 GiB used: 5.27 GiB (16.9%)
  Processes: 464 Power: uptime: 9m wakeups: 0 Init: systemd v: 255
    target: graphical (5) default: graphical
  Packages: pm: rpm pkgs: N/A note: see --rpm Compilers: gcc: 14.2.1
    Shell: Bash v: 5.2.26 running-in: konsole inxi: 3.3.36

I really hope some of you have any idea on how to solve this issue, beacuse I really liked using Fedora on my laptop in these past few months, and I’m thinking of making the switch from Windows for daily use (unfortunately, I will still need to keep it around in order to play games with kernel anticheat, or run software not compatible with Wine).

(I had to write this post directly on Fedora in order to be able to easily copy all the command outputs, and these 15 minutes were pretty painful to witness :sweat_smile:)

I see you have an RTX 4070 GPU.
Just a short time ago another user had a system with the 4090 and I assisted by suggesting he run the following steps with successful results that solved his issues.

  1. enable the additional rpmfusion repos as shown at https://rpmfusion.org/Configuration
  2. remove the existing 555 nvidia driver and upgrade to the 560 driver with
    sudo dnf upgrade akmod-nvidia --disablerepo rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver --enablerepo rpmfusion-nonfree
  3. reboot after suitable delay to allow the newer driver to be compiled & installed
  4. If you have not done so already it might be beneficial as well to install the xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda package.

It seems that some of the newer GPUs are not fully supported by the 555 driver and the 560 driver does properly support them. The rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver repo only provides the 555 driver at present.

Hi @computersavvy, I did what you suggested and installed the latest driver:

dnf list installed *nvidia*
akmod-nvidia.x86_64                                                                                                         3:560.35.03-1.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
kmod-nvidia-6.11.3-200.fc40.x86_64.x86_64                                                                                   3:560.35.03-1.fc40                                                                                    @@commandline             
nvidia-gpu-firmware.noarch                                                                                                  20240909-1.fc40                                                                                       @updates                  
nvidia-modprobe.x86_64                                                                                                      3:560.35.03-1.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
nvidia-persistenced.x86_64                                                                                                  3:560.35.03-1.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
nvidia-settings.x86_64                                                                                                      3:560.35.03-1.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.x86_64                                                                                                  3:560.35.03-5.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda.x86_64                                                                                             3:560.35.03-5.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs.x86_64                                                                                        3:560.35.03-5.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-kmodsrc.x86_64                                                                                          3:560.35.03-5.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64                                                                                             3:560.35.03-5.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-power.x86_64                                                                                            3:560.35.03-5.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-xorg-libs.x86_64                                                                                        3:560.35.03-5.fc40                                                                                    @rpmfusion-nonfree-updates

Now Plasma is finally running blazing fast, as expected from a 5900x + RTX4070.
The dummy monitor is now gone, and nvidia-smi is actually listing some information (before it was kinda broken, and was only showing the process kwin_wayland with just a few mbs of memory being used).

nvidia-smi
Thu Oct 17 02:20:25 2024       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 560.35.03              Driver Version: 560.35.03      CUDA Version: 12.6     |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                 Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp   Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |           Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                         |                        |               MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|   0  NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070        Off |   00000000:2B:00.0  On |                  N/A |
|  0%   43C    P3             19W /  200W |    1698MiB /  12282MiB |      1%      Default |
|                                         |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
                                                                                         
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU   GI   CI        PID   Type   Process name                              GPU Memory |
|        ID   ID                                                               Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|    0   N/A  N/A      1678      G   /usr/bin/kwalletd6                              2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      1904      G   /usr/bin/kwin_wayland                         377MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      1995      G   /usr/bin/maliit-keyboard                       68MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2009      G   /usr/bin/Xwayland                               3MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2059      G   /usr/bin/ksmserver                              2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2061      G   /usr/bin/kded6                                  2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2078      G   /usr/bin/plasmashell                          289MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2117      G   /usr/libexec/kactivitymanagerd                  2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2141      G   /usr/bin/gmenudbusmenuproxy                     2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2142      G   /usr/bin/kaccess                                2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2143      G   ...6/polkit-kde-authentication-agent-1          2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2144      G   /usr/libexec/org_kde_powerdevil                 2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2145      G   /usr/libexec/xdg-desktop-portal-kde             2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2146      G   /usr/bin/xembedsniproxy                         2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2287      G   /usr/bin/kdeconnectd                            2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2396      G   /usr/bin/xwaylandvideobridge                    2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2428      G   /usr/libexec/DiscoverNotifier                   2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2430      G   /usr/bin/kalendarac                             2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2505      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_control                        2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2549      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_akonotes_resource              2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2550      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_archivemail_agent              2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2551      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_birthdays_resource             2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2552      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_contacts_resource              2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2553      G   .../bin/akonadi_followupreminder_agent          2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2554      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_ical_resource                  2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2555      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_indexing_agent                 2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2556      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_maildir_resource               2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2557      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_maildispatcher_agent           2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2558      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_mailfilter_agent               2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2560      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_mailmerge_agent                2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2561      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_migration_agent                2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2562      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_newmailnotifier_agent          2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2563      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_sendlater_agent                2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2564      G   /usr/bin/akonadi_unifiedmailbox_agent           2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      2820      G   /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox                    420MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      3838      G   /usr/libexec/baloorunner                        2MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      3844      G   /usr/bin/plasma-systemmonitor                  43MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      3910      G   /usr/bin/systemsettings                       128MiB |
|    0   N/A  N/A      4086      G   /usr/bin/konsole                                2MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Right now it’s 2AM here, so I will consider myself satisfied with the result for now.
Tomorrow, I will follow up after some more actual testing.

Thank you for your help!

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