NVIDIA card not detected in laptop on Fedora 43

Ask Fedora
,
1

So I’m sitting here, wondering why my display’s brightness controls aren’t working, right? I remember having trouble on Kinoite before swithcing to a non-atomic version where the issue was with the nvidia drivers not being loaded. So, I run nvidia-smi and get the following:

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

Ah beans, guess I’ll hit up the ol’ google and see what the discussions here recommend.
“upgrade with dnf” done, no relevant changes made
“reinstall drivers” done, no change
“rebuild with akmods” done, no change

Then I noticed the card is not even in fastfetch! Not even in lspci!

# lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "3D|VGA"
pcilib: Error reading /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:00:08.3/label: Operation not permitted
35:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. [AMD/ATI] Rembrandt [Radeon 680M] (rev 0b)
        Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. Device 1244
        Kernel driver in use: amdgpu

Trying glxinfo with __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" gave me this!

X Error of failed request:  BadValue (integer parameter out of range for operation)
  Major opcode of failed request:  150 (GLX)
  Minor opcode of failed request:  24 (X_GLXCreateNewContext)
  Value in failed request:  0x0
  Serial number of failed request:  67
  Current serial number in output stream:  68

So I asked around amongst my more knowledgeable linux friends, all of whom were either perplexed that it was happening at all or suggesting what I’ve already tried.

Other info someone here might find useful: Secure Boot is disabled, GPU in the UEFI is set to “dynamic” (so not forcing iGPU nor dGPU, I could only do the latter anyway which’d give me a black screen), and

OS: Fedora Linux 43 (KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) x86_64
Host: ASUS TUF Gaming A16 FA607NU_FA607NU (1.0)
Kernel: Linux 6.19.8-200.fc43.x86_64

What do Reddit community? I’d really like to use my RTX for gaming, it’s been 3 weeks since I played anything.

2

You apparently don’t have the nvidia drivers loaded.

Can you confirm that you have followed the instructions here, and that it all went smoothly?

In fact, we can double check that they are installed cleanly if you post the output from ls -al /var/cache/akmods/nvidia/… seer anything with “failed” in the filename?

3

Your suggestion is a lot more complex (and user intensive) than using the one command dnf list --installed \*nvidia\* and looking for a kmod-nvidia .... package.

@hazzy you might try using lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 nvidia to verify the system actually sees the card. If it does not then nothing in mucking about with the drivers will work. The system must see and identify the card before it can even start to load drivers for it.

That command should show something like this.

$ lspci -nnk | grep -iA4 nvidia
06:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GA106 [Geforce RTX 3050] [10de:2507] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Device [1462:c979]
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia
	Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia
06:00.1 Audio device [0403]: NVIDIA Corporation GA106 High Definition Audio Controller [10de:228e] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Micro-Star International Co., Ltd. [MSI] Device [1462:c979]
	Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel
	Kernel modules: snd_hda_intel
4

Thank you both for the replies

@anothermindbomb no files with “failed” as far as i can see

$ ls -al /var/cache/akmods/nvidia/
total 37280
drwxr-xr-x. 1 root   root       658 Mar 23 19:24 .
drwxr-xr-x. 1 akmods akmods      12 Feb  4 01:00 ..
-rw-r--r--. 1 root   root   2897043 Mar  8 17:37 580.126.18-1-for-6.18.16-200.fc43.x86_64.log
-rw-r--r--. 1 root   root   2894824 Mar 15 21:43 580.126.18-1-for-6.19.7-200.fc43.x86_64.log
-rw-r--r--. 2 root   root   2895035 Mar 23 19:24 580.126.18-1-for-6.19.8-200.fc43.x86_64.log
-rw-r--r--. 1 root   root   8898630 Mar  8 17:37 kmod-nvidia-6.18.16-200.fc43.x86_64-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r--. 1 root   root   8839690 Mar 15 21:43 kmod-nvidia-6.19.7-200.fc43.x86_64-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r--. 1 root   root   8839207 Mar 23 19:24 kmod-nvidia-6.19.8-200.fc43.x86_64-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64.rpm
-rw-r--r--. 2 root   root   2895035 Mar 23 19:24 .last.log

(also modinfo -F version nvidia just says 580.126.18)

@computersavvy for the suggested lspci command the only output is

pcilib: Error reading /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000:00:08.3/label: Operation not permitted

so… I guess it does see something

And for the package list it’s

$ dnf list --installed \*nvidia\*
Installed packages
akmod-nvidia.x86_64                        3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
kmod-nvidia-6.18.16-200.fc43.x86_64.x86_64 3:580.126.18-1.fc43 @commandline
kmod-nvidia-6.19.7-200.fc43.x86_64.x86_64  3:580.126.18-1.fc43 @commandline
kmod-nvidia-6.19.8-200.fc43.x86_64.x86_64  3:580.126.18-1.fc43 @commandline
nvidia-gpu-firmware.noarch                 20260309-1.fc43     updates
nvidia-modprobe.x86_64                     3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
nvidia-persistenced.x86_64                 3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
nvidia-settings.x86_64                     3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia.x86_64                 3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda.x86_64            3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs.i686         3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs.x86_64       3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-kmodsrc.x86_64         3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.i686              3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs.x86_64            3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-power.x86_64           3:580.126.18-1.fc43 rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver
5

All is fine with the nvidia driver.

The card is not seen. Can you try to:

  • force the dGPU in the BIOS
  • at the grub prompt, edit the current boot (6.19.8)
    • suppress the rhgb option
    • add systemd.unit=multi-user.target
    • then boot with Ctrl-x

multi-user.target should prevent the black screen you indicated, and
give you textual consoles only.

From such a console, verify with lspci that the card is now seen.

lsmod | grep nvidia should show that the nvidia modules have been
loaded.

6

Try the command using a Live USB.

7

I declare witchcraft!

I followed your steps and got into a shell, ran both commands to get the outputs and then unset the dGPU force in BIOS (thinking all that’d happen was still no card shown, but still have a bootable system). And yet, it works!
__GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1 glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer" now outputs

OpenGL renderer string: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050 Laptop GPU/PCIe/SSE2

and it shows up in lspci and fastfetch, too!

$ lspci | grep -i nvidia
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation AD107M [GeForce RTX 4050 Max-Q / Mobile] (rev a1)
01:00.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation AD107 High Definition Audio Controller (rev a1)

I am still unsure what exactly caused and fixed it, but thank you!

8

That looks like a BIOS bug no ?

Is your iGPU seen now ?
Check as you did with: lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "3D|VGA"

If only the nvidia card is seen, you don’t need AFAIK to set:

  • __GLX_VENDOR_LIBRARY_NAME=nvidia __NV_PRIME_RENDER_OFFLOAD=1
9

Yes, both iGPU and dGPU are there.