X-server fails to load after update: Nvidia vs Nouveau

[Avaera]

Hi all,

I'm sorry if this has been asked a thousand times before, but I seem to run into the same issue without fail every time there is an update downloaded either for Mageia 3's kernel or the nvidia drivers. My display breaks, Mageia won't load any graphical display, and rather than dropping to a command line it repeatedly restarts the computer saying "There has been a graphics display driver change" and the machine needs to restart.

With my basic knowledge, I've tried various ways of solving the issue using the information I can find online, but this time it seems to have stumped me.

I can't load an X-screen, and to my untrained eye it looks like there is some conflict going on between the proprietary Nvidia drivers that were working fine before the update and the system infestation known as Nouveau. I've blacklisted Nouveau in /etc/modprobe.d, tried uninstalling the nouveau display package (although I may not have done that correctly - it orphaned a lot of packages), tried using "nokmsboot" and "nomodeset" options to the boot parameters (the latter worked once to get me into X, but after using that chance to try to reinstall the proprietary NVIDIA drivers it lost its magic).

I'm not sure what would be most helpful in diagnosing the problem - I have an NVIDIA GeForce 480, and am trying to use Mageia 3 with two monitors. My Xorg.0.log file and dmesg log file are attached, please let me know if anything else would assist in tracking down what I need to do to fix this issue for the short term, and permanently tell the system not to mess with the graphics drivers for future updates.

Thanks so much for any help you can give!

[jiml8]

I have been successful for years just downloading the driver from Nvidia and compiling it for my machine. I keep a copy of the latest driver available in ~, and whenever I have a graphics problem (common after any upgrade) I log into a console as root, shut down X, and run the Nvidia installer. It automatically compiles and installs the driver.

There ARE issues associated with the locations of certain files, and many common upgrades overwrite or change links to files that the Nvidia driver uses. The packaging for the distro should handle all of that, but I started downloading my own copies years ago when there were packaging problems. It might be that now there are packaging problems too...I don't know. Compiling my own copy of the driver always works though.

[Avaera]

Thanks for the reply, Jiml8.

After a couple more days of fiddling, I've solved the issue, and it did involve compiling the proprietary drivers from nvidia. Like you, I always keep a copy of the latest version in case there's an upgrade, but this time I wasn't able to recompile because it kept saying that Nouveau was in use (despite a blacklist file in /etc/modprobe.d). In case anyone has the same trouble, here's how I found to fix it:

1) Make sure there is a blacklist file for nouveau in /etc/modprobe.d (called blacklist-nouveau.conf for example), that contains the line

Code: Select all

blacklist nouveau

2) To actually stop nouveau from loading during init (since the blacklist is apparently ignored), generate a custom initramfs with the command:

Code: Select all

dracut -f -H --xz

3) After rebooting, nouveau will not be loaded. The latest proprietary Nvidia driver can now be downloaded from their website, and the installation script will do everything necessary to configure and install.

Hope that helps anyone else stuck without a GUI!