Laptop screen missing, external HDMI Works

edison.melo · November 10, 2020, 1:06am

Hi all

I have a new Acer Nitro 5 Laptop and it has the internal video and a nvidia card:

# /sbin/lspci | grep -e VGA
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU117M (rev a1)
06:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Renoir (rev c6)

I install F32 KDE and my original plan was use the internal video for the desktop GUI, and only use the nvidia card for CUDA… (now, I’m willing to compromise). I follow the fusion guide for drivers install and as far as I can see, the driver and CUDA is working… Next, I plug a external monitor and, to get video on it I added the Option “PrimaryGPU” “yes” to the X11 nvidia.conf file (Can someone clarify me if the optimus things apply to me having an AMD not Intel chip?)

But, in this config, I get frequently freezes an crashes, like this one:

So… I try to disable the amdgpu driver using grub options… like this:

rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau,amdgpu modprobe.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=amdgpu nvidia-drm.modeset=1 resume=/dev/mapper/fedora_localhost--live-swap00 rd.lvm.lv=fedora_localhost-live/root00 rd.lvm.lv=fedora_localhost-live/swap00 rhgb quiet

But then the laptop screen goes black… I get video on startup and shutdown, but nothing else. I cannot work without my second screen… what I can do ?

computersavvy · November 11, 2020, 1:47am

Can you go into bios and disable the amd GPU? This is the first I have seen a machine with both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. You do not have the common intel/nvidia pairing and those work well together but no one has ever needed AFAIK to prevent loading the intel i915 driver. What I suspect is that you will have to allow the amd driver to load then specify the nvidia as primary GPU as you already did. It should just work that way, using nvidia for both screens.

No, the optimus does not apply to your machine, in fact it only applied to machines during a certain time period with specified hardware config.

edison.melo · November 11, 2020, 10:10pm

I checked, but there is no option in the bios for that… If I load both drivers, I have video on both screens, but with recurrent crashes as the one I put in the first post.

edison.melo · November 12, 2020, 5:08am

Just for testing, I did a fresh install of F33. I see several chrashes of nouveau

I cannot see the external monitor. This is the xrandr output

Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1920 x 1080, maximum 16384 x 16384
eDP connected primary 1920x1080+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 344mm x 194mm
   1920x1080    144.00*+  60.00  
   1680x1050    144.00  
   1280x1024    144.00  
   1440x900     144.00  
   1280x800     144.00  
   1280x720     144.00  
   1024x768     144.00  
   800x600      144.00  
   640x480      144.00

I’m going to install nvidia drivers and see if something is different.

edison.melo · November 12, 2020, 5:26am

With the nvidia drivers installed, the external monitor appears:

Initially its black screen only, I need to set primary gpu to get video, but I continue having crashes as reported in the first post. Any ideas ?

edison.melo · November 12, 2020, 5:38am

It’s normal this output ? what is a prime display ?

kondor1986 · November 12, 2020, 5:45am

From what I can see there the Nvidia settings cannot control PRIME monitors, which is what it is selected. Through what port did you connected the display monitor to the laptop?

kondor1986 · November 12, 2020, 5:51am

In here set the monitor and mark it as Enabled and Primary (if you want to see the main desktop on the external monitor), or leave Primary unselected to use the laptop display as primary and the external monitor as secondary and see if you have any issues.