Tricky situation with RPMFusion Nvidia 390xx drivers [GeForce 820M, black screen]

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Hello! So I’ve been in this really tricky situation on a fresh install where I’ve been trying to set up the proprietary RPMFusion 390xx drivers on an hybrid/Optimus laptop [i5-4200U, GeForce 820M], but it just seems to keep on failing to give a display output no matter what I do.

Despite my chip being on the GeForce 800 lineup, it still uses the older Fermi architecture, meaning I have to use the older legacy 390xx driver, otherwise it just will ignore the GPU.. Nvidia’s official 470xx driver was also to no avail, throwing the same error. Upon further research, it turns out that it was only for Kepler architecture chips (840M above).

With more research, I found out that a few people have also been having issues with LightDM on the 820M, with similar issues on similar Optimus configs.. I tried the steps on this 5 year old post on askubuntu highlighting almost the exact same issues with LightDM on this GPU, with a user only having success on no other DM but GDM.. But that was 5 years ago when Gnome still used X11 :confused:

Currently, with GDM, there somewhat is video output now! Compared to LightDM where it showed absolutely nothing, it was a bit of progress.. but still unusable. I was stuck on a white cursor while my backlight switches on and off every 3 seconds..

Looking into journalctl -xeu gdm, this error comes up repeatedly:

Apr 14 16:20:00 fedora gdm[22286]: Gdm: GdmDisplay: Session never registered, failing
Apr 14 16:20:00 fedora gdm[22286]: Gdm: Child process -22329 was already dead.
Apr 14 16:20:00 fedora gdm[22286]: Gdm: GdmDisplay: Session never registered, failing
Apr 14 16:20:00 fedora gdm[22286]: Gdm: Child process -22329 was already dead.
Apr 14 16:22:50 fedora systemd[1]: Stopping gdm.service - GNOME Display Manager...

IIRC I saw somewhere that this seems to come from GDM trying to invoke wayland-session or something without it being there.. I apologize, I’m not really the most knowledgable in this. According to this comment, apparently Wayland doesn’t support any Nvidia driver below the current one (470xx below).

..So now I’m trapped in this situation where the drivers seemingly just don’t work with LightDM, is stuck in X11, and oh how great! Now the only DM that worked with 390xx dropped support for that.. Goodness gracious, if only Gnome didn’t think of dropping X11, I’d not be here in this tangled mess.

So the only things I could possibly think of, are:

  • I have to downgrade to F42 so I can stay on the Gnome version with X11 support (unrecommended, EOL in a month)
  • Suffer with my weak CPU’s iGPU, which is not great as I do record videos often..

..Or I’ve been wondering, is there any way I could get GDM 48 with X11 support?

SPECS:

Host: 20404 (Lenovo Flex 2-14)
Linux 6.19.11-200.fc43.x86_64
DE/WM: XFCE 4.20 (Xfwm4, X11) on Fedora 43
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4200U (4) @ 2.60 GHz
GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce 610M/710M/810M/820M / GT 620M/625M/630M/720M [Discrete]
GPU 2: Intel Haswell-ULT Integrated Graphics Controller @ 1.00 GHz [Integrated]

Any advice or help is greatly appreciated.

2

Despite that pretty much everyone is ditching X11, electing to move to Wayland, you could switch to a desktop which still supports X11 to eke the effective lifespan of the gfx chipset out a little longer.

3

If you have seen, I am currently using XFCE right now, yes!
Not only because of familiarity, but because my chip’s drivers don’t support Wayland either. Unfortunately, the drivers don’t work properly with LightDM, only pre-Wayland GDM, and that is the issue I have..

5

I checked the tags and there were none, so I’ve added a few for you.

8

GNOME-50 has removed all support for x11.

9

Lightdm normally connects to the iGPU, 390.xx didn’t have much if any optimus support.

Is it possible to disable the iGPU?

10

Oh, I see.. Strange how it doesn’t render then only when the nvidia drivers are installed. Is there any other way to use the iGPU for screen rendering and only the dGPU for 3D apps (games, etc.)? I hope to have something like what bumblebee would’ve done, but it doesn’t exist anymore.

IMG_20260414_193041_105
IMG_20260414_193041_1051920×1440 348 KB

Also, my BIOS unfortunately only allows either iGPU only or Discrete + iGPU. I remember seing that solution somewhere else, where display works after the laptop is configured to only use the dGPU.. Why is that?

11

switcherooctl perhaps?

12

Awesome stuff! This was exactly what I was looking for to use GDM on X11 [:

I had a few issues earlier though, especially with trying to get into XFCE. I don’t exactly remember what I did to fix it, but disabling SELinux (it was blocking things and causing freezes), messing around a bit, restarting a couple of times, along with setting WaylandEnable to false in /etc/gdm/custom.conf was FINALLY able to get me into my desktop!

Everything works as expected so far. nvidia-settings has all the options, nvidia-smi shows the correct driver. I will continue to monitor how this will perform, but so far the only issue is GDM freezing when logging in and out.

How long would it continue working for until it’s deprecated?

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13

Thank you! Is there a way to integrate this command into the context menu on XFCE?