Hi to all,
I’ve been using Fedora for several years, and I’ve never been interested so much in discrete graphic cards. Now I got a Lenovo Thinkpad P53s, that comes with an Nvidia Quadro P520 and I’m trying to get it working.
I installed the driver from Rpm-Fusion as described. Also I noticed some problem on Kernel or driver upgrade. I read that is related to system suspension, so I masked the nvidia-powerd.service.
Unfortunately, It seems not to work.
As far as I know, Nvidia driver works on Wayland but in a dedicated session you have to choose from GDM. I don’t have this option available. I can see an option “launch with discrete graphics card” right-clicking on program icons, but nothing seems to happen.
Here the questions:
What is the state of art of nvdia graphic card? I mean could I use the “launch with discrete graphics…” option under Wayland? It would be my preferred behavior since I don’t use dGPU so much.
What have I to do in order to get at least the GDM session active?
Some specs:
Lenovo Thinkpad P53s - Nvdia Quadro P520
$ modinfo -F version nvidia
535.54.03
$ uname -r
6.3.8-200.fc38.x86_64
I hope you can understand my English since it’s not my mother language.
Any advice would be appreciated. Many thank in advance.
Paolo
A couple things that you can provide for us to assist.
Please post the output of dnf list installed '*nvidia*' dnf repolist lsmod | grep -E 'nouveau|nvidia' inxi -Fzxx mokutil --sb-state
With that info we should be able to identify most problems and provide suggestions.
I also suggest (if not recently done) that you do a full upgrade sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
In the previous post I forgot to add that I generated and imported the signature key for using nvidia drivers with secure boot enabled, as explained in rpmfusion’s guide.
The strange thing about that listing is the output of the listing of nvidia packages installed.
One thing clearly missing is the nvidia-gpu-firmware package which is required to support nvidia cards.
Also several of the additional packages that are installed as dependencies for installing akmod-nvidia are missing.
I would have expected that to show something like this.
At this point I would suggest you do a removal of the nvidia packages using sudo dnf remove '*nvidia*' --noautoremove
followed by a reinstall with sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia nvidia-gpu-firmware xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda
Wait at least 5 minutes after the install has completed and verify the modules are properly built with dnf list installed kmod-nvidia-$(uname -r) before rebooting. If that does not show the package as installed then wait a bit longer to reboot. That package is built and installed by the akmod-nvidia package after it is installed.
Now what happens if one switches to xorg for the DE instead of wayland? Nvidia-smi is not the only tool to use for verifying the GPU is in use. In fact a dGPU is normally not used by default but must be selected specifically when an app is opened using a right click on the icon for the launcher.
My bad. My previous message was incomplete. I get the nvidia-smi output above also launching some programs (e.g. Gimp) right-clicking and selecting dGPU. Same on Xorg.
I’m a bit disappointed with the behavior of Fedora and Wayland using Nvidia driver. If you search for fedora 38 nvidia wayland on Google, the very first result is
And I also can’t use the Nvidia driver nor with this forum users’ help.
I can’t actually figure out if it is possible to use Gnome Wayland session with proprietary driver.
Do you think it could be a problem related to this specific distro? I would like to use Fedora and the full capacity of the hardware. I restored open source nouveau driver at the time of writing.
As usual, any help would be appreciated.
What you posted some time ago (July 27) showed that you were using the nvidia 535.54.03 driver and that you had the 6.4.4 kernel.
Fedora has updated to the 6.5.8 kernel and the nvidia driver from rpmfusion is 535.113.01
Have you updated to the latest and still have problems? Has it been resolved? What is your newest status. dnf list installed \*nvidia\* and inxi -Fzxx are requested for continuing discussion.
I am using wayland with nvidia on both my desktop and my laptop and updated to F39 with no problems at all. I even updated F39 with dnf upgrade --enablerepo=updates-testing so I was able to upgrade the kernel to 6.5.9 and everything just works as expected.
Many thanks for your quick reply. I hope I could express, with my poor English, that I wasn’t complaining about the forum’s support. I purged nvidia drivers some times ago since I couldn’t get them working. My system is up-to-date, and I’m currently using nouveau.
BTW
[paolo@fedora ~]$ dnf list installed \*nvidia\*
Errore: Nessun pacchetto corrispondente
(error: no package corresponding)
This tells me that when you removed the nvidia drivers you also may have removed the required nvidia-gpu-firmware package that is provided by fedora. The firmware package is usually required for the GPU to function regardless of the driver in use. – Reinstalling it is as simple as using the command sudo dnf install nvidia-gpu-firmware.
Without the firmware installed it is likely impossible to get the GPU to function properly.
You also could try the drivers again with first checking to ensure that secure boot is disabled dmesg | grep secure then install the drivers with sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda and wait at least 5 minutes after the install completes before rebooting.
It certainly is not the same as the previous post.
You said that dnf list installed \*nvidia\* previously shows nothing installed. If nvidia-smi is active and returns those results then the driver packages must be installed and the kernel modules must be loaded and in use.
To confirm please post the output of lsmod | grep nvidia, dnf list installed \*nvidia\* and finally the full output of inxi -Fzxx
I mean, I don’t know If I’m actually using the dGPU or not when launching a program with that options.
I was referring to the post I wrote on 27 July. Maybe previous was not the right adjective.
I would thank you for your patience. Here the output of the commands you asked for
To me it appears that everything you posted shows the nvidia drivers working properly.
When you right click and select the “Launch with discrete graphic card” option it is designed to do exactly that. I am not sure you would see anything to identify that it actually works up front, but rest assured it should (or would provide a message if not).
You seem to be using wayland, and I am not sure how to force the system to use the dGPU as primary with wayland, but it is used when you choose to do so when launching the app. It can easily be configured as primary when using the xorg DE so then everything would use the dGPU full time.
I also run a Nvidia Optimus system, Just this output is enough to tell me that your Nvidia dGPU is running fine.
To be sure, try to run something GPU intensive (a game or a tool, anything could do) and run nvidia-smi again, the process for whatever program you ran will appear as well.
A tip I give you is to enable runtime power management:
Read a bit of the other stuff on the same page for more info.
Just a important note, NVIDIA DOESN’T SUPPORT PRIME RENDER OFFLOAD ON WAYLAND.
It works for Xorg and Xwayland application, but it doesn’t work under Wayland.
This means that if an application tries to use the GPU under Wayland it might instantly crash (I had this issue with Cemu and yuzu, for example), the solution is to force the application to run under Xorg. The new 545 driver might have changed that, but dunno yet.
