I was running a system update when I noticed a couple of weird xorg-x11-drv-* packages were installed on my system. Knowing that Wayland is the defacto display driver for Gnome on Fedora, I couldn’t imagine how they got there.
I figured that I may have accidentally installed them when I installed akmod-nvidia for my intel + nvidia hybrid GPU (which should only require xorg-x11-drv-intel|nvidia) but if I run a history check it doesn’t make much sense.
dnf hist --installed | grep xorg-x11:
xorg-x11-drv-amdgpu.x86_64 21.0.0-1.fc34 @updates
xorg-x11-drv-ati.x86_64 19.1.0-5.fc34 @anaconda
// Lots of other probably OK drivers
name : xorg-x11-drv-amdgpu
Install Date: Fri 13 Aug 2021 12:43:13 AM PDT <-- What?
I ran dnf rq --whatdepends/--whatrequires xorg-x11-drv-amdgpu and get 0 results.
Maybe this was part of the live disk image installation in an attempt to make sure hardware support was covered? I wish I had paid more attention to the dependencies I installed with the 46 modest dnf changes I made in the last 4 days.
sudo dnf autoremove does not bring up these drivers, so I’m thinking they were explicitly installed somehow or are ambiguous dependencies.
I’m wondering if it’s safe to remove these drivers or if I should leave things well enough alone? If anyone has any tips on how to gumshoe how/when they all got installed so I can find/prune other accidental, unneeded packages I’d appreciate it.
If you installed the nvidia drivers then wayland is no longer the default display but it was replaced by xorg since nvidia and wayland still do not play in the same sandbox together.
If you would list the explicit packages you are concerned about a more definitive answer could be provided, but I expect they are related to the nvidia install.
I’ve only spotted the two that I listed in the original post. I could only speculate as to which ones I may have accidentally installed. If there are more than these two then I am unaware of them. I’m trying to figure out how to become aware of them without combing 2200 installed packages.
Those two are probably a result of activating xorg and they are drivers for xorg related to the other types of GPUs available. Should not be an issue at all since they would only become active were you using an ati or amd GPU. They should be there just in case you ever remove the nvidia gpu and install one of the other types.
I guess so. I wish there was a simple way to look back at side-effects from installing packages so I can have the piece of mind that I’m not going to kludge up my system. I’ll just pay closer attention to dependencies from here on.
I have the same 2 packages on my system that has never run anything but an nvidia GPU and has been upgraded with each release for several years. They seem to be a part of xorg and are for the case where your GPU of choice is not nvidia.
