Restore nouveau drivers

Ask Fedora
1

Can I follow the steps in Official Nvidia drivers made things worse - how do I get back to nouveau? - #6 by computersavvy

And restore the nouveau drivers by doing

sudo dnf remove *nvidia* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware

?

2

What is wrong with the answer in your other post on the same topic?

1 Like
3

certainly that works, but the command should be modified to
sudo dnf remove \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware

Two threads for the same issue are strongly discouraged.

duplicate of Restore nouveau drivers
I am merging the topics.

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4

Is it possible to remove the nvidia native drivers and switch back to the nouveou drivers? Is that described somewhere?

5

https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryHowto%5Cb%29#Uninstall_the_NVIDIA_driver

7

for the sake of completeness, it should be noted that this command may not produce the desired result, see:

$ sudo dnf remove *nvidia* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware --assumeno 
No packages to remove for argument: nobara_nvidia.txt
No packages to remove for argument: nvidia
No packages to remove for argument: nvidia-hwaccl
No packages to remove for argument: nvidia-s2idle_support


Nothing to do.

$ ls -ald *nvidia*
-rw-r--r--. 1 markus markus 107 May  3  2023 nobara_nvidia.txt
drwxr-xr-x. 1 markus markus 286 Nov  8 21:43 nvidia
-rw-r--r--. 1 markus markus 169 Nov 27  2023 nvidia-hwaccl
-rw-r--r--. 1 markus markus 238 Aug 22  2024 nvidia-s2idle_support

You need to escape the asterisks in the shell correctly

'*nvidia*'   or  \*nvidia\*      instead of   *nvidia*
8

Correct.
That command should instead be
sudo dnf remove \*nvidia\* --exclude nvidia-gpu-firmware
When there are files in the current directory that contain nvidia in the name it interferes unless the * glob is escaped for passing to dnf.
I fixed my answer above.

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9

When you install the Nvidia drivers from RPM Fusion, doesn’t it blacklist nouveau? So to switch back to nouveau, don’t you also need to remove the blacklists? The RPM Fusion instructions don’t say to do that, or how to do it if it’s necessary.

10

Quoting the Nvidia Howto page:

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.

11

Those instructions are for using the nouveau driver while booting when the nvidia driver is installed.
It seems that the instructions for removal of the nvidia driver do not address the removal of the entries from the kernel command line. I have not tested a removal to see if the kernel command line is updated when the akmod-nvidia package is removed. I do know it is not directly altered using the command I gave above, though the package removal may do so.

It is simple but may differ depending on how and when the nvidia driver was installed.

  1. cat /proc/cmdline to see what was put in there. It may be one or the other of the below.
    rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core modprobe.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core
    or
    rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau
    Newer installations should show the first.

  2. Removal of the option would also be very easy.
    sudo grubby --update-kernel=ALL --remove-args=' rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core modprobe.blacklist=nouveau,nova_core '
    where the options to be removed would be exactly what was shown in step 1.

This process with grubby takes care of the current kernel options and all future kernel updates.

12

Thanks Jeff. It would be nice of the RPM Fusion removal instructions could be updated to include that info.