nVidia Driver on Fedora 41 KDE

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1

Hi, I’m a relatively new Fedora user, and I’m trying to get the proprietary nVidia drivers to work on my Thinkpad T440p. It has a discrete GPU, which is a GK208M [GeForce GT 730M] according to lspci. The guides I have seen seem to be mostly for X11 (not wayland) and not for Fedora with KDE. But I want to use nVidia drivers to get more performance than I think I can get with the current nouveau drivers. I have installed akmod-nvidia, run akmods and dracut, and edited the grub config so as not to require signatures, but the kernel is still not loading the nVidia drivers. Secure boot is disabled in the UEFI BIOS and the grub config.

I used these commands to make the module:
sudo akmods --rebuild
sudo akmods --force
sudo dracut --force

The module seems to be installed:
modinfo nvidia
filename: /lib/modules/6.12.6-200.fc41.x86_64/extra/nvidia/nvidia.ko.xz
alias: char-major-195-*
version: 565.77
supported: external
license: NVIDIA

But is not loaded:
lsmod | grep nouveau (shows many lines that include this name)
lsmod | grep nvidia (shows nothing)

I see these error messages in dmesg:
sudo dmesg | grep nvidia
[ 18.429905] nvidia: loading out-of-tree module taints kernel.
[ 18.429945] nvidia: module license ‘NVIDIA’ taints kernel.
[ 18.429966] nvidia: module verification failed: signature and/or required key missing - tainting kernel
[ 18.429971] nvidia: module license taints kernel.
[ 20.130169] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 511
NVRM: visit Unix Drivers | NVIDIA for more
[ 20.135873] nvidia-nvlink: Unregistered Nvlink Core, major device number 511
[ 29.361293] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 511
NVRM: visit Unix Drivers | NVIDIA for more
[ 29.366877] nvidia-nvlink: Unregistered Nvlink Core, major device number 511
[ 68.624669] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 511
NVRM: visit Unix Drivers | NVIDIA for more
[ 68.630977] nvidia-nvlink: Unregistered Nvlink Core, major device number 511
[ 79.493843] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 511
NVRM: visit Unix Drivers | NVIDIA for more
[ 79.499851] nvidia-nvlink: Unregistered Nvlink Core, major device number 511
[ 88.827425] nvidia-nvlink: Nvlink Core is being initialized, major device number 511
NVRM: visit Unix Drivers | NVIDIA for more
[ 88.829621] nvidia-nvlink: Unregistered Nvlink Core, major device number 511

Secure boot is disabled in the UEFI and here in the grub config:
sudo nano /etc/default/grub
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR=“$(sed ‘s, release .*$,g’ /etc/system-release)”
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT=“console”
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=“rhgb quiet module.sig_enforce=0 cpufreq.default_governor=powersave rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau”
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY=“true”
GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg

So what am I missing here? I don’t need or want to set up certificates to sign the driver, just to make it work. Also, is there a wayland-specific package to install? Or is it just akmod-nvidia? I don’t have nvidia-smi, and I don’t know how to configure the nvidia driver by itself. ChatGPT said to install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-wayland, but that is not in my repos, and I do have the fusion repos added.

Thanks in advance.

2

Do you have secure boot enabled in the BIOS?
Did you setup akmod signing key for secure boot?
If not the nvidia module you built will not load.

3

RIght, Secure Boot is disabled in the UEFI BIOS, and I would like to make the kernel accept drivers that aren’t signed.

When I run mokutil: mokutil --sb-state
I get this response: SecureBoot disabled

4

Ok so its not a signing issue.

What I suggest is to do this to prevent the nouveau driver being loaded
when the nvidia driver fails to install.

sudo systemctl mask nvidia-fallback.service

Now reboot. Login to a console and manually load the nvidia driver.

sudo modprobe nvidia

Does that work? If not what are the error messages you see?

5

Okay, Both before and after masking the fallback service and restarting, I got the same error from modprobe:

modprobe: ERROR: could not insert ‘nvidia’: No such device.

6

From the nvidia website it appears that the 730M was released with the 390 driver. It seems that you might need to remove the current driver and replace it with the much older 390xx driver.
sudo dnf remove \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia-390xx xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-390xx

image
image692×513 30.7 KB

7

Awesome, That worked very well. Basically, I did:

sudo dnf remove \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware
sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia-390xx
sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-390xx-cuda (cuda is at the end)
sudo akmods --rebuild
sudo akmods --force (not sure if this one is necessary)
sudo dracut --force (or this one)
sudo nano /etc/default/grub (some items in the command line were duplicated)
sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
sudo reboot

When I logged into KDE, I ran lsmod and saw that nvidia was loaded and not nouveau. I can now run nvidia-smi. Yes, this is a really old system, but it’s never disappointed me :slight_smile: I had thought it would be the newer driver because of the documentation below. It seemed like my GeForce GT 730M would be in the GeForce 700 series, but I’m not really knowledgeable about graphics cards.

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA?utm_source=chatgpt.com#Legacy_GeForce_600.2F700

Jeff and Barry, thanks very much for your help. :smiley:

1 Like
8

Even the GT 730 was only released with the 470 driver and nothing newer