Serious Graphics Error after update

I just updated through zypper and when I get to the login screen it shows the login then flicks to a black screen and sometimes back to login. However things work normally if I boot using the 3 option from grub.

(Before this almost the same thing happened at the emergency command line due to NVIDIA not having been recompiled for the new kernel, it would flicker between the command prompt and a blank screen that showed input that wouldn’t reach the main terminal, I got around this using init 3).

Any advice on how to either recover or safely roll back to before the last upgrade ? (I’m using snapper and btrfs but I’m not sure how to handle rolling back the ramfs bit and don’t want to end up in serious trouble).

You might need to read this it may help.
https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way

I already have. It doesn’t seem to be an error with NVIDIA drivers at least not directly / solely.

If you used the hard way then you must reinstall the NVIDIA driver after any kernel or X stack updates

Yes, I know. I already did that.

Before that as I said it would flicker between the text based prompt you get from the NVIDIA drivers failing to load and a black screen that seemed to display part of my terminal input (which wouldn’t reach the normal screen, this happened so fast both seemed to ‘fllicker’ on the screen). I rebooted and edited the grub command line to boot with init 3 which allowed me to install the new NVIDIA drivers.

After that it would reach the graphic login but flicker (much more slowly) between that and a black screen.

Rebooting and using grub with init 3 goes to a normal level 3 prompt without flickering. Its like something at a later stage intializes two x-sessions that are each trying to seize the monitor.

Its pretty much messed up.

What card? there are problem with some of the old style drivers for older cards.

If using BTRFS and snapper you can roll back

Booting to previous kernel may help get to a GUI

You can boot to terminal (run level 3 ) and run yast to remove the bad kernel and taboo it to stop installing it. but remember you will need to un taboo to get to the next

I’m using 980Ms so shouldn’t be a card problem.

I’m happy to roll back but is there anything I need to do to safely roll back the kernel / boot chain ? I thought there was a mini ramfs that got stored in the EFI partition and there’s a pretty big jump between my previous state and the latest kernel. If I can just snapper back and boot with the old kernel from the advanced options I’ll do that.

Is this a hybrid graphics Intel+NVIDIA GPU Optimus system?? If so you can not use the normal NVIDIA driver you must use bumblebee or Primus

No, it’s an SLI setup not a hybrid setup.

Did a rollback and after some poking it turns out the latest NVIDIA driver is just borked. It messed things up when I installed it on the rolled back system too.

More specifically the SLI support for 980Ms seems to have broken in the 375 drivers.