Hello all,
I have fedora 44 with the gnome de on my laptop. I have an nvidia graphics card on this laptop and used the instructions from rpm fusion to have the proprietary driver installed. For a while things were good. One day when i used the software app to update fedora i noticed the error “nvidia kernel module missing. Falling back to nouvea” when the laptop was booting. I tried a lot to no avail.
I checked to see if secure boot turned back on with
mokutil --sb-state
and it said it was disabled.
I tried sudo akmods --force --rebuild and after rebooting the same error
I followed the instructions to remove the drivers with dnf and remove akmod and rebooted. I then re-installed and still the error persists when booting the machine.
Also what i noticed is odd is i used an application called waycheck before and it worked. Now it does not and says a wayland session is needed. When i log out in the sign in prompt there is nothing about an x11 session or wayland session there.
What can i do to get the nvidia drivers working again?
Share the boot log - that might tell us what’s going on.
The upgrade that broke things - was it an upgrade from F43 to F44, by any chance? That has been messing up a lot of people’s setups if they have an older GPU, due to a newer driver being auto-installed even though that driver isn’t supported.
If that is what happened to you, this should fix it:
I had the exact same error with my RTX GPU. Tried installing the nvidia kernel module as well as xorg11 second time; error persisted. However, a clean removal and reinstall of the whole Nvidia driver did the trick.
First verify if the driver is installed and running by a simple nvidia-msi command. If it does not give you a table of results, then the driver needs to be cleanly reinstalled.
That happened because those users hid under a rock for the last 6 months, it’s been announced here several times that nvidia main update to 590xx+ dropped support for older cards.
When reporting problems you need to provide details that will allow others with access to similar hardware and Fedora version to reproduce the issue. You haven’t even provided the details of your Nvidia GPU, we are left guessing.
Linux has serious problems getting current information to users. Life for many users leaves little time for keeping up with Linux after work, family, and too little sleep.
The web is filling up with multiple AI generated clickbait articles, all with similar incomplete and outdated content. Combine that with an educational system that is failing to teach basic reading skills and you end up with users who struggle with command-line tools.
Aye - people only show up here when there’s an issue and at that point it’s too late to realise that some website you never read has been stating “older cards will have to stick to the 580 drivers” for months.
Generally, these kinds of issues should be communicated in release notes or advisories that are sent to customers. Though I guess on Linux a lot of people will not read even the release notes and there’s no way to send advisory notices to users either.
Thank you everyone for the replies! The laptop card is quite old, it is a 1050. Accoding to Yuri’s post the card had its support dropped by nvidia with the current drivers. That would make sense why nothing i do seems to work with getting latest packages and drivers. I will try the work around provided in the links.
Related to support being dropped i read amd has much better support for linux drivers now where they dont require proprietary drivers like nvidia. Would this be less of an issue with amd cards?
What I know is that AMD GPU drivers are inherent in the Linux kernel itself, so you don’t need to install additional drivers to make it work (exceptions for multimedia codecs).
It’s better to disable Nvidia GPU while on Linux. It improves battery life, lays much less stress on your discrete GPU. Besides the halting of support for your 1050, your OS would function more smoothly on your integrated GPU (Linux has inbuilt support for it) resulting in much fewer headaches related to driver freezes.
I use the dGPU only for Windows and that is only for graphics intensive applications.
This is inaccurate; you can’t make broad statements like that without knowing the user’s use cases and setup.
Pascal is still officially supported by NVIDIA, by their now-LTSB aka “legacy” 580xx driver. It just won’t get new features, but will get support for critical fixes for a while yet. (And the RPM Fusion folks do an amazing job to package even older drivers and keep them usable longer.)
And in general, 580xx works well with Linux from my experience. It just takes a couple extra steps to set up on Fedora (and in this case, another step to fix the breakage from this very specific upgrade/EOL situation.)
Maybe or maybe not.
A broad statement such as this seems personal opinion and cannot be factual for everyone due to the broad spread of hardware, software, use cases, work flow, etc.
In fact, the nvidia 1050 gpu is well supported by the 580xx driver and swapping from the 595 driver to the 580xx driver is mostly painless as shown by the common issue linked in post 10 above.
