Cannot boot using nvidia-dkms, have to install nvidia

General system EndeavourOS installation
26

Eureka, looks like @joekamprad was correct in that it was either a CPU or RAM issue.

I iteratively stepped back my mother board settings.

  1. First I tried turning off TPM, sudo pacman -S nvidia-dkms, hard lock
  2. Then I tried turning off XMP, , sudo pacman -S nvidia-dkms, hard lock
  3. I restored optimized defaults on my motherboard which reset 2 CPU specific settings, 1 CPU/RAM setting.
  • BCLK 100Mhz lock → Disabled
  • Enhanced Turbo → Auto
  • Undervolt Protection → Auto

With these off, sudo pacman -S nvidia-dkms, dkms / dracut successfully rebuilt and I could load into KDE.

So it was an “overclock” issue, I suspect Enhanced Turbo as this allows 2 cores to 5.8 and the rest to 5.5 on a 13900K.

This is a feature of Intel CPUs and shouldn’t cause this issue, I am going to turn each back on one by one to determine which is causing it.

EDIT It was/is Enhanced Turbo