I previously tried to install the Nvidia drivers using the official RPM Fusion install guide. However, for some reason, the drivers didn’t work very well for my system. I would get errors describing how the GPU has fallen off the bus. I tried to use the uninstall guide but ended up getting the dreaded black screen after rebooting. To make matters worse, this black screen happened for all kernels that I tried to boot into. I essentially had to reinstall Fedora. Special note, the script seems to be designed for x11, but I’m running Wayland. Could that be an issue? Do you think this guide should be updated?
No, the package names in the guide are the correct ones to use on Wayland. Don’t worry about the x11 in the names.
No - that uninstall command is correct.
Your system should have fallen back to the nouveau driver, which is what it’ll be running when you first install Fedora without applying any third party packages.
From your initial thread, you’re using KDE, right?
I wonder if something larger is going on here.
You’re definitely not the only one who has ended up with a black screen at KDE startup, when nouveau should have been working fine.
Is that true for all nvidia GPUs?
Maybe the works vs. balck-screen is GPU model specific?
Which driver did you install and which nvidia GPU do you have?
For old nvidia cards you need old versions of the nvidia driver code.
There is an alternate command often recommended to ensure a complete removal of all nvidia related packages.
sudo dnf remove \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware
This command ensures every package that contains the string ‘nvidia’ which is installed when installing the akmod-nvidia package is removed. It also keeps the firmware package that is required for use of the nouveau driver.
I have not tested the command given in that guide to see if there may be differences but trust that the package source (rpmfusion) is competent enough to ensure that their command works as intended.
BTW: if the command dnf list --installed nvidia-gpu-firmware does not return that package in the list, then it will need to be installed with sudo dnf install nvidia-gpu-firmware before the nouveau driver can function.
Yeah, it could well be - I don’t have a great account of why it’s happening. I’ve just noticed a few times recently that a Fedora KDE user gets a black screen because the drivers aren’t loading, whereas what they should get is a working system with nouveau, i.e. a normal-ish desktop session with substandard acceleration.
FYI: I no longer have an nvidia GPU to test with so this is all unresearched speculation on my part.
I am using the KDE version. I installed the latest drivers for the RTX-4070 (laptop) GPU
One other thing I recall is that these two commands failed:
rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/libGL.so.* /usr/lib{,64}/libEGL.so.*
rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
I think it said something about a file not existing. I should have wrote this down and I don’t want to go through the ordeal of breaking my system again to find out. I also think this command failed because the file also didn’t exist.
mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.saved
I remember this worked though:
dnf reinstall -y xorg-x11-server-Xorg mesa* libglvnd*
First one is fine - not being able to delete stuff because it does not exist is not an issue - it’s the intended result.
Same with the second - you don’t have a xorg.conf because you’re not using X11.
Those commands are in the section dedicated to removing drivers installed by Nvidia’s own installer (not from RPMFusion).
So if you had installed the drivers from RPMFusion, then there would have been nothing to remove and what you saw is expected.
I ran the following command from the official guide (before running the other commands):
sudo dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia\*
If the command you suggested is better, do you think it should replace what I ran? Also, I read that the RPM installer blacklists the nouveau driver, do both of those commands (the one you suggested and the official one I ran) undo that action? Also I think it should be made clearer that this is the only command you need to run if you installed the drivers using the official method. There is no description there so it’s hard to know if it’s the only thing I need to do.
The “Recover from the NVIDIA installer guide”, is a different guide than the “Uninstall the RPM Fusion nvidia driver”, you didn’t send the nvidia-bug-report.sh output, so I guess you have a basic understanding of what title and sections are.
Check this passage
Switching between nouveau/nvidia
With recent drivers as packaged with RPM Fusion, it is possible to switch easily between nouveau and nvidia while keeping the nvidia driver installed. When you are about to select the kernel at the grub menu step. You can edit the kernel entry, find the linux boot command line and manually remove the following options “rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau”. This will allow you to boot using the nouveau driver instead of the nvidia binary driver. At this time, there is no way to make the switch at runtime.
The nvidia install procedure should remove these kernel parameter, but it would be a good idea to check it regardless. If nouveau is blacklisted and you don’t have the nvidia drivers installed anymore, I would expect some display problems.
I have used systems that only had Nvidia graphics, and still have one. If the Nvidia driver fails to load, they have always done “Fallback to nouveau”. The most recent example:
Jul 07 12:03:27 kernel: Fallback order for Node 0: 0
Jul 07 12:05:12 systemd[1]: Starting nvidia-fallback.service - Fallback to nouveau as nvidia did not load...
Jul 07 12:05:13 systemd[1]: Finished nvidia-fallback.service - Fallback to nouveau as nvidia did not load.
This fallback service is part of the nvidia driver from rpmfusion. This service is removed along with the driver.
$ rpm -qf /usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-fallback.service
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-610.43.03-1.fc44.x86_64
Right, I remember reading this, but I have no idea how I would actually go about doing it. There is no link or guide to that either.
On the grub menu you see the last two lines which says to press “e” to enter edit mode. Then
You can edit the kernel entry, find the linux boot command line and manually remove the following options “rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau”.
How to get out of edit mode is also shown on the screen.
Display the grub boot menu. With the menu displayed and the kernel to be booted highlighted press the e key to edit that entry.
The line that begins with linux contains the portion to be deleted.
If the menu does not automatically display when booting you should be able to hold down the shift key (immediately after the bios splash screen is displayed) to force it to display