neither nouveau nor proprietary drivers for NVIDIA graphics card working

English Hardware
#1

Hi Everyone

I have been running OpenSuse Leap 15.1 with Gnome for about six months. It’s been great. Until now. At the point of installing Leap 15.1 I was using onboard Intel graphics (Core i5). Everything worked fine.

This week I bought a graphics card to add to my system (MSI NVidia GeForce GT 1030). I installed the card and booted into OpenSuse. The desktop appeared (dual monitor) but straightaway I found that everything was stuttery: the mouse cursor, windows, all motion was stuttering. It’s almost unusable. Having done some research I found that the native NVidia driver is called ‘nouveau’, and I can confirm that nouveau was running. ‘nomodeset’ in grub2 disables nouveau and resolves the stuttering, but then obviously there is only very basic graphics capability and my second monitor doesn’t turn on. I tried installing the proprietary NVidia drivers via Yast (‘The Easy Way’) and the installation seems to succeed, but upon reboot, nothing has changed: the NVidia drivers have been installed but they don’t load and it is still in the basic graphics mode.

I tried doing a fresh install of Leap 15.1 on a different hard drive in the same system with the new graphics card, and everything works perfectly: nouveau works, and then installing the proprietary NVidia drivers via Yast (‘The Easy Way’) also works fine and the NVidia drivers load correctly. (Also, on my Windows7 installation, the new card works perfectly with the Windows NVidia drivers installed.) Obviously I would like to avoid doing the whole Leap 15.1 installation from scratch because it would take days to redo everything and recreate what I currently have (desktop set up, applications set up, email, hardware, etc). I really can’t face doing all of that all over again.

I’ve spent two days trying to fix it and I am at a loss. The problem seems to relate to the fact that the graphics card was not in the system when Leap 15.1 was originally installed about six months ago.

Please help!

Thank you in advance,

James

#2

  1. I can’t find any error messages relating to the stuttering with nouveau.

  2. With the proprietary NVidia drivers installed:

‘nvidia-settings’ gives: “ERROR: NVIDIA driver is not loaded’ and 'ERROR: unable to load info from any available system”

‘sudo nvidia-settings’ gives: “Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused’ and 'ERROR: The control display is undefined; please run ‘nvidia-settings --help’ for usage information.”

#3

Hi
Are you running Wayland or Xorg (x11) on the original Leap 15.1 install?

Did you boot/switch to runlevel 3 and ensure the nouveau driver was blackilisted/not loaded (grub add: nouveau.modeset=0) before installing the nvidia driver, then rebuild initrd (mkinitrd)?

#4

  1. ‘loginctl show-session 1 -p Type’ gives ‘Type=x11’

  2. I installed the proprietary NVidia drivers via Yast and the NVidia repo (note that I have done this while ‘nomodeset’ was added in grub2, and I verified that nouveau was not running via ‘hwinfo --gfxcard’)

#5

Hi
So you have removed the nomodset? Can you check the blacklist file exists for nouveau in /etc/modprobe.d;


fgrep nouveau /etc/modprobe.d/*

/etc/modprobe.d/50-nvidia.conf:blacklist nouveau
/etc/modprobe.d/50-nvidia.conf:options nouveau modeset=0

If you rebuild initrd does that help?


mkinitrd
#6

1)nouveau is blacklisted:
fgrep nouveau /etc/modprobe.d/*
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf:blacklist nouveau
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-default.conf:blacklist nouveau

  1. I tried mkinitrd and I got a black screen on boot
#7

Hi
So if you press ctrl+alt+F1 to get to a tty can you login there? Did you check that nomodeset is NOT in grub?

#8

  1. I had tried mkinitrd and got a black screen yesterday (I think). I did a snapshot rollback to get out of that. I just tried mkinitrd again and this time it did boot in the desktop but it has made no difference to the NVidia drivers.

  2. Yes, nomodeset is not in Grub.

#9

Hi
Can you install inxi and post the output from;


inxi -GSxx
#10 

james@Takeshi:~> inxi -GSxx

System:        Host: Takeshi Kernel: 4.12.14-lp151.28.40-default x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 7.5.0 Desktop: Gnome 3.26.2
 
               wm: gnome-shell dm: GDM Distro: openSUSE Leap 15.1 
Graphics:      Device-1: NVIDIA GP108 [GeForce GT 1030] vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: N/A bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 10de:1d01
        Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.3 compositor: gnome-shell driver: N/A note: display driver n/a - try sudo/root
        FAILED: nvidia resolution: 1920x1080~77Hz s-dpi: 96
        OpenGL: renderer: llvmpipe (LLVM 7.0 256 bits) v: 3.3 Mesa 18.3.2 compat-v: 3.1 direct render: Yes

james@Takeshi:~> sudo inxi -GSxx

System:        Host: Takeshi Kernel: 4.12.14-lp151.28.40-default x86_64 bits: 64 compiler: gcc v: 7.5.0 Console: tty 0 dm: GDM
        Distro: openSUSE Leap 15.1

Graphics:      Device-1: NVIDIA GP108 [GeForce GT 1030] vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: N/A bus ID: 01:00.0 chip ID: 10de:1d01
        Display: server: X.org 1.20.3 compositor: gnome-shell driver: N/A note: display driver n/a FAILED: nvidia
        tty: 160x24
        Message: Advanced graphics data unavailable in console for root.
#11

Hi
And you have to G05 440.100 driver installed?


zypper se -si *nvidia*
#12

Hi
I would also be tempted to create a 50-nvidia.conf file as per my output and rebuild initrd again…

#13

yes 440.100; all four packages

#14

I’m not sure what you mean by ‘as per my output’. Also, how should I create the 50-nvidia.conf file? Copy the nvidia.conf file and rename it?

#15

OK, tried that; no change. Thank you so much, going to sleep now (00:12 UK time). Back tomorrow morning (9am UK time).

#16

UPDATE: PARTIAL SOLUTION

There were two issues that I raised with this thread. When I added an NVidia graphics card to a system with an existing installation of OpenSUSE Leap 15.1:

  1. nouveau is stuttery

  2. proprietary NVidia drivers do not run

I have resolved issue 1. Wayland needs to be disabled. I did this by uncommenting the line #WaylandEnable=false in the file /etc/gdm/custom.conf.

I suspect that the reason this was not a problem with the fresh installation, is that the installer detected the NVidia card and disabled Wayland automatically.

I still do not have a solution to the proprietary NVidia drivers not running (note that disabling Wayland does not resolve the issue).

#17

You have tried two of the three competent X drivers applicable to NVidia graphics. You might wish to give the default a try. The default actually supports AMD, Intel and NVidia graphics similarly. https://forums.opensuse.org/showthread.php/541300-HDMI-in-openSUSE-15-1-running-drivers-NVIDIA?p=2944090#post2944090 describes the default. If you can make it work, usually easy simply by uninstalling xf86-video-nouveau, but not well enough to satisfy, shifting back to NVidia afterward could very well produce better results than the initial try.