Good evening all, hope you’re doing well. I have recently installed Fedora 40 KDE edition with ZFS through this guide, and it worked well. I was able to use the laptop like normal on the integrated graphics, but I wanted to use the dedicated gpu (NVS 5400M) built into my laptop for some light gaming. I noticed the nouveau driver was already installed, but from past experience I wanted to get the Nvidia driver as soon as possible. I discovered that the “rpmfusion” method was the best way to achieve this, and after following that tutorial my install no longer boots to the user selection screen, and instead boots to a blinking white cursor. I got here by blacklisting the nouveau driver after installing the Nvidia driver. I also noticed that the Nvidia driver is never loaded, as /proc/driver never gets an nvidia directory populated.
(I dont know enough about traditional Fedora + NVIDIA so its not really helpful)
I highly recommend using uBlue Kinoite-nvidia, which is made from Fedora Kinoite (Atomic KDE), gets the driver replaced with the above steps and “just works”.
Fedora simply cant legally ship ISOs with the driver in it, so you will always have bad situations like these, where you are on your own.
But for sure the atomic systems have other specialities.
Maybe Ultramarine Linux or Nobara could be alternatives, but I personally dont trust any of them to be as reliable.
Installing the nvidia drivers from rpmfusion manages all that you hinted at here and does it automatically during the installation.
The need to disable secure boot or to locally sign the nvidia driver modules is the only thing that is not explicitly managed.
@fyredragon69
Please be a little more specific with the current config.
This is quite vague as to what you actually did and the “tutorial” you followed.
Was it the instructions at Howto/NVIDIA - RPM Fusion or something else?
Please show us the output of dnf list installed '*nvidia*' and sudo dmesg | grep -iE 'secure|nvidia|nouveau' as well as cat /etc/default/grub
Apologies for not providing more detail, I’m not always sure when it comes to troubleshooting like this. Here’s the output of dnf list installed ‘nvidia’ and sudo dmesg | grep -iE ‘secure|nvidia|nouveau’. I cannot provide the contents of /etc/default/grub, as I do not have grub installed on this system. As I mentioned earlier, I used the ZFS Boot Menu guide which installs their bootloader, used for booting ZFS. And to answer your question yes, I followed the instructions at https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA to attempt to install the Nvidia drivers.
Please always post the text asked for directly here as much as possible.
Pastebin is a short term location for large files and whatever you put there disappears after about 24 hours. The output from pastebin is also not scrollable so the right edge of the data is wrapped.
It appears that you installed the 390xx driver which may be appropriate for that age machine.
However the system is clearly old (10+ years) and very underpowered for fedora F40.
According to the readily available specs for the T530 it seems it would have the NVS 5400M GPU. To confirm the gpu installed please post (as preformatted text here using the </> button on the toolbar) the output of lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 -E 'vga|3d'
According to the driver info from nvidia that card should be using the 334.21 driver (which would probably require the 340xx driver from rpmfusion).
Try that driver version and I hope it will compile and function for you with the newer kernels.
You can use dnf to remove the nvidia 390xx drivers
sudo dnf remove \*nvidia\*390xx\*
and install the 340 drivers with sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia-340xx
My bad once again. I was aiming to not flood the thread with text but if it aids in any way I shall do so. Here is the output of lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 -E 'vga|3d:
fedora% lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 -E 'vga|3d'
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GF108M [NVS 5400M] [10de:0def] (rev a1)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device [17aa:21f6]
Kernel driver in use: nouveau
Kernel modules: nouveau, nvidia_drm, nvidia
fedora%
I will attempt to uninstall the old 390xx drivers and try again with the 340xx drivers and report back if I succeed or not. Thank you for all your help so far by the way.
That didn’t seem to fix it unfortunately. I still boot to the white blinking cursor, but can still access the shell on other TTYs. As is it getting late in my timezone, I will have to return to this tomorrow.
Note that it was suggested that you use the </> button to post as preformatted text. If you highlight the text after pasting then click the button it adds ``` on the lines before the text and after the text to retain formatting.
In your post above with the lspci output that did not happen and it was all one line. I took the liberty of editing the post so the on-screen formatting was restored but please remember to use that method to post the text as “preformatted text”. You can manually add the ``` on the lines before and after the text as well.
I’m back to try this again. What more can I do to fix this issue of just a white blinking cursor?
What is the result of cat /proc/cmdline
The contents of /proc/cmdline are
Northstar% cat /proc/cmdline
root=zfs:zroot/ROOT/fedora quiet rhgb spl.spl_hostid=0x00bab10c
Northstar%
I’d also like to note that I’ve tried booting with and without the nouveau module enabled, both resulting with the white blinking cursor. I achieved this by creating blacklist-nouveau.conf in /etc/modprobe.d and having this as the contents:
blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
I disabled this blacklist by renaming the file to blacklist-nouveau.conf.bak which was easy enough to revert.
(I hope this formatting is better and works for you, otherwise I’m not sure what you want me to do)
Try adding this to the command line while booting if you can. Using ZFS I am not sure how that would be done. With grub a menu shows up and the user is able to edit the kernel command line from that menu (for testing purposes).
rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau
I also use this but I suspect it is only for the much newer nvidia drivers.
nvidia-drm.modeset=1
What does lsmod | grep nvidia display.
Yes, the formatting you did looks great.
I had a similar issue when installing 340xx driver on an old MacBook as per RPM Fusion’s instructions. Switching to nouveau in grub didn’t help.
My “fix” was to reinstall the OS and stay “low-profile” with the nouveau drivers, but I wonder if these legacy Nvidia drivers are still maintained, given also the note from RPM Fusion’s website:
Still available on “best effort basis” (newer kernel may break, will be discontinued at anytime if not actively maintained).
It is important to remember that nouveau does not have ‘versions’ per se but attempts to continue support for the older generations of cards while improving support for newer cards as well as newer kernels. That is at best a difficult path to follow successfully.
Keeping the older proprietary drivers functional with changes in kernels and NO additional support from nvidia is a monumental task considering the very few users who rely on those older GPUs. As I understand it nvidia does not actively support any of the drivers used on linux that are 470 or older.
What would be the best course of action in this situation? Would it be worth attempting to use an older kernel to see if it would work?
Personally I would bite the bullet and upgrade my laptop to a newer model with more powerful and better supported hardware.
I cannot assist much more since this appears to be a hardware vs driver vs kernel issue and the only way I could see to resolve it would be to either
- Reinstall and avoid the ZFS issue so grub and normal manipulation of software that most of us use is possible.
- Revert to an older version of fedora which then would have and remain on older kernels where the drivers may function properly.
Since I would never recommend #2 for any reason unless the system were isolated and never connected to the internet; that option is out in my opinion.
ZFS makes managing of kernel modules different than with grub so that is an issue of its own.
As time passes and development continues the differences between the new kernels (and libraries) and the older hardware will continue to grow so that problem expands.
You will have to come up with a solution that works for you. Just remember that software development is ongoing and the hardware is stuck in time.
If you were to choose option 1 them we could work through the normal steps to try various kernel command line options and attempt a repair. There are relatively few who use ZFS so there are few who may be able to delve into the inner workings and assist here.
Added zfs
I suppose I will give option 1 a try and report back. Thanks for all the help so far Jeff, you’ve been a very valuable resource in my troubleshooting adventures.
I’ve reinstalled Fedora 40 without ZFS this time and unfortunately I got the same results. 390xx gave me a black screen and no TTY access, while 340xx gave me the dreaded white cursor and TTY access. Both times the NVIDIA module loaded, and the kernel arguments did look correct to me. While on 340xx, I tried startx to see what it would do, and I saw a glimpse of the NVIDIA splash screen. I would consider this progress, but I don’t really know what this is.
Not a big bullet: large numbers of enterprise grade laptops that don’t support Windows 11 are available at attractive prices either from vendors or resellers and make excellent Linux platforms (because they have been around long enough for bugs in linux support to be fixed). Many people find that Intel graphics on newer systems meet their needs, so you may not need Nvidia hardware, which make life with linux simpler. Use the LHDB to see what issues a particular model has with Linux. You may need to install a different WiFi card (some resellers will do that for you) or use a USB WiFi or Bluetooth dongle.