Anybody else having trouble with Nvidia drivers after updating the kernel to 5.10.4?
I’ve been using the Nvidia drivers with Bumblebee on TW for years and years, so I’m familiar with many (most?) of the pitfalls, fixes and workarounds. Yesterday, I updated TW (and did the usual mandatory dance of uninstalling Bumblebee/bbswitch/et cetera, rebooting, and re-installing) but came back with a blank black screen when I logon via Gnome. It’s the same behavior when booting with modesetting enabled or the Nouveau drivers not blacklisted.
If I boot to the alternative 5.10.3 kernel, I get a Gnome desktop, but with broken dGPU/Bumblebee.
FWIW, there are no (well, only the usual) errors returned when installing the Bumblebee Nvidia drivers for either the 5.10.3 or 5.10.4 kernel.
Is there maybe a change in the way modesetting works under 5.10.4? I’m stymied and would love to try some new ideas.
I was never able to get the “safe way” install working on TW, so I’ve been maintaining my own version of the TW bumblebee repo to keep up with compatibility issues between the kernel and nvidia. I never change anything but the version, though.
As it turns out, I don’t have any reference to nvidia in that /X11/xorg.conf.d/ directory, but I do have some leftover config files from trouble-shooting years ago. I’ll try getting rid of those and see what happens. (And I’ll add a step to check there in my “Bumblee broke again” notebook that I started keeping.)
I don’t remember when I started having to uninstall bumblebee every time there’s a kernel update. It was a workaround I discovered a long time ago. If I do it, everything (usually) works and it doesn’t if I don’t.
It’s odd that I can get a graphical environment in 5.10.3 but not in 5.10.4, with the same configuration.
As far as sticking with Bumblebee instead of moving to Prime… It’s a great option for desktops, I think. On a laptop, where battery life is important but some tasks are better with the dGPU, rebooting to switch between GPUs isn’t a good solution for me.
Can you boot on 5.10.4 in command line mode? You can try to see if there is anything to do with Nvidia in the dmesg
dmesg |grep -i nvidia
and similar to bbswitch and bumblebee.
If all else fails, I can attest that the “safe” way that I compiled has been working just fine and usually doesn’t break upon update, so it’s very low maintenance… for now. I can help you walk through it if it comes down to it.
Hi
One thing I have noted in the recent threads about dual (or more) gpu’s is the output from xrandr --listproviders, if you see NVIDIA-Gn then can use either methods, if no output then you need to use bumblebee…
Hi
One thing I have noted in the recent threads about dual (or more) gpu’s is the output from xrandr --listproviders, if you see NVIDIA-Gn then can use either methods, if no output then you need to use bumblebee… The main advantage is no logout/login to switch devices with either offload or switcherooctl (which is a kernel function).
Still no luck with the config files, either. I don’t have any reference to ‘nvidia’ under xorg.conf.d/ and commenting out the lines in the files I do have makes no difference.
I did get a notification from the NVIDIA dev list that there’s an update to the latest drivers because of some quick bug fixes and security issues. I’ll update that today and see what happens.