At login (sometimes) a Notification tells me NVIDIA drivers aren't running

General system Kernel, boot, graphics & hardware
1

…but it immediately disappears and according to NVIDIA’s control center it is running just fine, humming along at 34 degrees Celsius.

2

You can check with inxi -Ga. I usually have mesa-demos, and xorg-xdpyinfo installed so it gives me the full info on graphics and monitor. Sometimes you’ll find you think it’s okay but is not running on the card for rendering.

Edit: This is one of the reason’s i have the full setup done for additional enhancements and i don’t have that issue happen any more.

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Looks okay, and it’s only sometimes. This time for example it didn’t send that notification.

bgeek @ ~ ➤<((º>
➤➤ inxi -Ga
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel CometLake-S GT2 [UHD Graphics 630] vendor: Lenovo driver: i915 v: kernel bus-ID: 00:02.0 
           chip-ID: 8086:3e92 class-ID: 0380 
           Device-2: NVIDIA GP107 [GeForce GTX 1050 Ti] vendor: Micro-Star MSI driver: nvidia v: 470.63.01 
           alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:1c82 class-ID: 0300 
           Display: x11 server: X.org 1.20.13 driver: loaded: nvidia resolution: <missing: xdpyinfo> 
           Message: Unable to show advanced data. Required tool glxinfo missing.
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This doesn’t show all the info. It only shows that the driver is loaded for both the device and the X11 but, they can be loaded and not using it to render hence the message. It is this that you want to see to verify but you need to install mesa-demos and xorg-xdpyinfo. Edit: Or glxinfo

If it doesn’t show the card here then it’s rendering via software and it will show that.

  OpenGL: renderer: Radeon RX 590 Series (POLARIS10 DRM 3.42.0 5.14.2-arch1-2 LLVM 12.0.1) v: 4.6 Mesa 21.2.1 
           direct render: Yes
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Well, that took a year to download (glxinfo). Anyway…

OpenGL: renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti/PCIe/SSE2 v: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 470.63.01 direct render: Yes
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I usually use mesa-demos. But anyway this is how your card is being used to do the rendering. If it isn’t it will say usually Mesa …blah blah blah and not the card. Sometimes you can’t tell when it’s running this way under normal use. This makes it easy to identify if there is an issue with the driver being configured properly.

Edit: The additional enhancements help by loading the nvidia module in the mkinticpio.conf file when driver updates happen as sometimes nvidia doesn’t configure properly.

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Since the notification disappears by itself and only appears randomly…

If this had been Windows I would just write it off as the driver not having fully loaded yet and then corrects itself but not in time for the notification to not pop up. Is that possible in Linux?

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I’m not sure. All i know is i had one system that was doing this frequently and that’s how we came up with the additional enhancements and i haven’t had anymore driver issues with updates anymore. I also had it happen on my system once with a different nvidia card. Lately though i haven’t seen any issues with it. I actually just reinstalled on that system to test the new ISO and i didn’t add the enhancements currently. I may not unless i have issues. I had done it before just testing it.

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