NVidia drivers with Fedora 31+KDE

Cyborg13

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I am trying to nail down the issues with the nouveau driver and NVidia/Intel graphics on HP laptops. I have Fedora 31 with KDE Plasma installed on my HP in a dual boot with Windows 10. It will boot up and is usable, but there are errors with the nouveau driver.
First, on boot, it will show the BOOT_IMAGE error message.
Screenshot_20200408_191040.jpg


When shutting down or trying to restart, I will get this error:
nouveau 0000:02:00.0: tmr: stalled at ffffffffffffffff
It appears several times on the screen. The computer requires a hard shutdown with the power button to continue.

While troubleshooting the driver issue, I searched both errors and what I could find on both errors pointed to the nouveau driver with nVidia cards and seemed to be mostly an issue on HP. I also found this guide for installing proprietary drivers:
NVidia Drivers Install Guide
While I'd prefer to avoid proprietary stuff, it looks like that's going to be what's necessary to get this to work with the equipment I have. So I started following the guide, and ran the lspci command, which came back with this:
lspci.jpg


Querying the graphics hardware also seemed to cause an error, and I got the same message as above stating that "it looks like a problem occurred," which appears 3 times. The console will not run any other commands, and everything except the cursor freezes shortly thereafter, requiring a hard shutdown. I'm guessing this is also related to the driver issues.

Section 1.2 of the guide talks about certain lspci outputs. The example isn't specific, but it seems to refer to the VGA controller not being nVidia, but integrated with the Intel hardware. Am I interpreting that correctly? Or is it referring to something more specific in the 2 examples provided? I can't find anything suggesting that I have Optimus and there is no option in the BIOS (that I can find) to disable it even if it is there. The NVidia Optimus guide and the Bumblebee project page referred to in that section haven't been updated in years so I'm wondering if that might be outdated and not applicable to my new hardware. I am hesitant to proceed any further without knowing for sure so I don't end up breaking something.
Also, the guide suggests that the 8/9/200/300 series use the 340 driver, but on the nvidia compatibility page, the GeForce MX250 is listed in the 440 section. If I proceed with this guide, which would be appropriate for the MX250?

Any help or insight is appreciated.
 


I'll check that out, thank you. I've been getting frustrated trying to get it working properly, and as a newbie I'm questioning if I should keep fighting with it, or jump ship to something else. I like the KDE Plasma environment...is there another distro that supprts Plasma and would work better with my hardware?
 
I use KDE Neon. It's based on Ubuntu but distributed by the KDE team. It gets updates much more often than other distros. There's 2 editions, user and testing. I use the user one, is stable while testing could be unstable. I've been using it for 2 or 3 years and have been quite happy with it. It's KDE the way the KDE team wants it. Kubuntu is also a good edition for Ubuntu. I used that for many years before Neon. Both install easily and are easy to maintain. And almost every application has a .deb install option, the same can't be said for .rpm.
 
Well the RPM Fusion driver seems to have worked. I got the initial BOOT_Image error the first couple times I booted up, but everything seems to be working. I think all I need to do is disable nouveau and I should be set. For now I'm going to stick with Fedora, but if it becomes an issue later, I'll keep Neon in mind. Someone else suggested OpenSUSE so that'd be a possibility as well.
 
The nvidia RPMs should disable the nouveau stuff by default.

If you have the rpmfusion repo's installed, it's pretty easy to install the nvidia drivers.

dnf install -y nvidia-xconfig nvidia-settings akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-kmodsrc kmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia nvidia-modprobe nvidia-persistenced kernel-devel kernel-headers

You can do a ...
dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nouveau. But usually this isn't required.

The kernel-devel and kernel-headers packages are required for kernel updates. Anytime you
do a dnf update and the kernel version gets updated, it has to recompile the nvidia drivers
for that kernel. (It takes a few seconds, be patient).
 
I got the boot Image error the first time or two I booted up after installing the RPM drivers, and since then, no issues. Never did have to remove or disable nouveau manually. Thanks again.
 

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