Hi,
I have recently installed Fedora 38 - I3 spin on my laptop and it have been working greatly. Until I try to install nvidia drivers from rpmfusion. Installation goes fine, but after few restarts the problems starts to show. After selecting kernel version from GRUB boot menu and plymounth graphical boot, instead of LightDM the screen goes black without cursor.
The only way to fix it is switching to different tty, deleting all of nvidia drivers (sudo dnf remove *nvidia*) and rebooting again.
Any suggestions on fixing, or atleast debugging this?
Thanks.
Now may we also see the output of dnf list installed '*nvidia*' and cat /etc/kernel/cmdline
The only repo I see that may be questionable is the 1password repo.
The inxi output tells me you are using the integrated graphics and not the nvidia gpu? That may be part of the problem since the dGPU is not active with the current config.
If you wish the best and full time performance from the nvidia GPU the instructions on how to configure that are here. Those instructions make it possible for the nvidia dGPU to manage both the internal screen as well as an external screen. By default nvidia normally only manages an external screen. You are already using xorg for the DE so that should work properly for you.
I found another way to get LightDM to show without uninstalling nvidia drivers. By logging to another tty and restarting the LightDM service. Also I do not want to nvidia to manage my internal screen, due to the battery drain, having it only manage external displays is fine by me.
Your previous uninstall of nvidia appears to have also removed the nvidia-gpu-firmware package.
It may be reinstalled by either dnf reinstall linux-firmware or explicitly by dnf install nvidia-gpu-firmware
Following that install then reboot so the proper firmware is loaded for that gpu.
My laptop is newer than yours and also optimus.
With the nvidia GPU set as primary and apps running with ~20% CPU load full time I still get more than 3 hours battery life. When the laptop is less loaded I get up to 6 hours life. I can live with the slight battery life reduction to have the improved graphics on screen.
Neither reinstalling explicitly or by reinstalling linux-firmware fixed the problem. The only hint i see about the problem now is that after restarting lightdm service, only thing that blinks is Failed starting service nvidia-powerd or something like that.
The nvidia-powerd warning is only that. It tells you the nvidia-powerd service is unable to start because the GPU is not supported by that service. Totally benign and can be ignored.
You can see the result of the firmware install by repeating the dnf list installed '*nvidia*' command, which should now show the nvidia-gpu-firmware package in that list.
I cannot assist further with LightDM as I have no experience with it directly.
It is kinda interesting that only nvidia drivers installed can cause this kind of problems. I have looked through journalctl and logs in /var/log/ that seemed relevant but nothing looked wrong. Only errors were the one with the nvidia-powerd service, which I found that it’s intentional.
Will try to set the nvidia gpu as primary to see if it fixes anything or will stick to noveau drivers.
You did not want nvidia as primary.
Simply follow all those instructions except do not edit the nvidia.conf file after copying it into the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory and it will allow use of the nvidia gpu at users choice but not making it primary. The editing and adding that line into the file is actually what makes the gpu act as primary.
Once that file is in place and the user has rebooted then a right click on a desktop icon should bring up a menu to select using the dedicated gpu for that app if the user chooses.
I am having the same problem. Changing to a different ty i can run “sudo systemctl restart lightdm” and it gives me a login screen and everything works fine. I have tried everything I can find online with no luck.
I know it’s kinda old discussion at this point but for the future people who might find it.
I have the same problem with fedora everything 40 with awesome wm and lightdm. what I found is running grub2-mkconfig after every kernel update kinda solve the problem? I’m still not sure but I definitely see much much it less now. cause it doesn’t happen every time. I found an arch linux thread talking about changing the order of loading kernel modules but I don’t know these things tbh. but it’s definitely related to nvidia modules not loading sometimes.
You are correct about this being an old thread and you should have started your own.
However, the comments you make seem to indicate you may be using grub2-mkconfig with a command similar to grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub .cfg.
This does work since that file is the first that grub looks at, but was changed with about fedora 34 release to become a pointer to redirect grub to the actual grub.cfg file at /boot/grub2/grub.cfg. The correct command is thus grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
Once /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub .cfg has been overwritten and is no longer the default pointer file then the system updates cannot automatically keep it in sync when a new kernel is installed (the updates only change /boot/grub2/grub.cfg)
A fix to restore automatic updates of the grub.cfg file is to
sudo rm /boot/grub2/grub.cfg /boot/efi/EFI/fedora/grub.cfg to remove the old files
sudo reinstall grub2-common which will rebuild both those files properly
If you look at the output of ls -ld /etc/grub2* you will see two links that both point to the same file ( /boot/grub2/grub.cfg).
I am closing this thread and if you are still having problems after reading and following these instructions then please open a new thread for your current issue.