Keep NVIDIA card disabled

English Hardware
,
1

I have a laptop with Intel+NVIDIA graphics. Running Leap 15.5, this system has run flawlessly, with over a year between reboots (daily suspend/resume cycles). Finally, I decided to try to update to Leap 16.0 (15.5 → 15.6 → 16.0), and found that not only did all of my hardware acceleration stop working (Mesa, VA-API, etc.), but that the system would freeze after suspend, forcing a hard reset. Obviously unacceptable, but I am not asking for help in troubleshooting this.

Eventually, I restored a snapshot of my system to Leap 15.5, and it has returned to stability. Running inxi -Gxx, I see that for this installation (Leap 15.5), the system has disabled the NVIDIA card (driver: N/A), but after upgrading to 16.0, the new installation was using it (driver: nvidia), without me having enabled anything explicitly. My question is: how does my Leap 15.5 system disable the NVIDIA device? (If I decide to upgrade again, I might experience better results if I manage to disable the NVIDIA card. This isn’t the first time I’ve had problems with NVIDIA cards.)

There are sites that mention ways to disable the NVIDIA GPU, but they reference software I don’t have, or other methods that don’t apply. For example, the source is not:

  • BIOS: I changed no BIOS settings during the upgrade
  • nvidia-smi tool: I only use open-source software (OSS repo), so I don’t have this tool on my system
    • In fact, zypper se -i nvidia only matches kernel-firmware-nvidia and openSUSE-repos-Leap-NVIDIA (but I disabled that repo, since it’s non-free)
  • Boot parameter: only have mitigations=auto in the boot line; that doesn’t relate, does it?
  • Module/driver parameters: Nothing NVIDIA-specific in either /etc/modprobe.d or /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d

Lastly, in 15.5, I use X11 (XOrg), but in 16.0, Gnome forces Wayland. I would think that this disabling of the GPU happens at a lower level than the compositor, but if not, I would still have interest in knowing the mechanism how this happens.

2

This only means that the driver was not or not correctly installed.

3

Show

modprobe -c | grep -E nvidia\|nouveau
4 
alias mbp_nvidia_bl apple_bl
alias pci:v000010DEd*sv*sd*bc03sc*i* nouveau
alias pci:v000010DEd*sv*sd*bc0Csc80i* i2c_nvidia_gpu
alias pci:v000012D2d*sv*sd*bc03sc*i* nouveau
alias typec:id0955m* typec_nvidia
alias wmi:603E9613_EF25_4338_A3D0_C46177516DB7 nvidia_wmi_ec_backlight
5

So, nothing is disabled. And

lspci -nn | grep -E VGA\|3D