Rpmfusion nvidia drivers on Fedora 42

Ask Fedora
1

I am stuck again. Following Jeff V’s instructions here:

I did

$ sudo dnf update -y
$ sudo dnf install akmod-nvidia # let it build kmod
$ sudo dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

Upon reboot,

lsmod | grep nvidia

gives nothing and

nvidia-smi

says

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn’t communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

2

Did you disable Secure Boot? It’s required for the Nvidia driver, but the old topic does not mention it.

3

I did not! Thank you. So go to bios/efi > disable secure boot > boot into fedora… Then dnf remove nvidia drivers? And try again?

4

I don’t think you need to reinstall it. Disabling Secure Boot should be enough.

1 Like
5

So leave Secure Boot disabled forever?

Edit: I think I’m not understanding something again. What exactly should I do after disabling secure boot?

6

I think if the driver has already been built (modinfo -F version nvidia prints the version of the driver), then you don’t need to do anything after disabling Secure Boot.

If you want to enable Secure Boot, you’ll have to import your self-generated key. Check the guide here: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/Secure%20Boot?highlight=%28%5CbCategoryHowto%5Cb%29

7

It is optional. You can install your own secure boot key and leave secure boot enabled.

2 Likes
8

I see two possible issues:

  1. There was not enough time for the driver modules to get built before rebooting.

You can check that with:

$ uname -r
$ dnf list --installed "*nvidia*"

You should see the kmod-nvidia package listed, suffixed with the kernel version. If not sure, please post here the output.

OR

  1. nova-core has not been blacklisted.

Kernel 6.15 introduced the new nova driver for NVIDIA GPUs, intended to supersede the older nouveau drivers. So those using the proprietary NVIDIA drivers, should also blacklist nova-core, in addition to nouveau, in the kernel arguments.

See here for details.

9

I am now unable to boot. I have the exact same problem I encountered here:

This time I found a reddittor that swore they had figured out how to get nvidia drivers working with secure boot on. I followed the instructions and very nervously rebooted after

mokutil --import /etc/pki/akmods/certs/public_key.der

and now am getting

Failed to open \efi\boot\mmx64.efi - Not Found

before grub comes up. I fixed this somehow 20 days ago, but don’t really remember what I did. Does anybody here know how I managed to break my boot twice now trying to follow detailed instructions?

More to the point, how can I fix this please?

Edit: I’ve turned off secure boot and grub came back from the dead. I am amazed that I appear to be the only person on the internet to hit this trouble spot.

Carefully re-reading https://github.com/roworu/nvidia-fedora-secureboot,
I see that I skipped the step

dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia\*

I expect I will be uninterested in secure boot for at least another 20 days, but maybe my mistakes are illustrative.