Can't boot after today's update

Desktop Environments XFCE
42

I must say that proprietary NVIDIA drivers has been a pain with Xfce at least since the update to 5.10.x.
To the point that I went back to the Nouveau drivers for my NVIDIA card since I don’t game on Linux anyway.

What kernels do you all use? Because I had a lot of different problems including severe screen tearing (something I haven’t had since the very first 4.x.x kernels) to lockups (total lockups, with frozen cursors and everything) and random hangs at boot and / or shutdown in every kernel version after 5.9.x. Both 5.10.x and 5.11.x has just not worked with my NVIDIA 1050 card and proprietary drivers.

With the Nouveau everything works flawless with the LightDM manager and Xfce.

43

I’m just using the current kernel. I don’t tend to use lts kernels and if i was to use another kernel it would probably be the zen kernel.

Edit: I don’t do any gaming so wouldn’t know how that works.

44

My comment about gaming is just that since I don’t, the slight performance drop in Nouveau compared to the proprietary drivers is not noticeable AND it works much better so that’s why I have decided to use them.

45

I have an AMD RX 590 also. But, i don’t do any gaming either. NVIDIA is a pain alright. I definitely prefer the amdgpu even over Nouveau.

1 Like
46

good to know, i was already thinking to add this as default settings… but it seems 2021 is the year of Screwed-Nvidia-Propritary-Driver-Implementation

6 Likes
47

Updated my system today, and checked the file /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
The module nvidia remains…

As per Ricklinux previous comments, it is a good idea to always check if an update will remove it, right?

48

I only checked this when inxi -Ga was reporting the renderer was incorrectly running in software mode and not the graphics card. That’s when i found this had happened and it was only once that i noticed it after having this problem a couple of times. Since then with the additional enhancements it has been okay. But one never knows when an Nvidia driver update comes it may mess up again. :thinking:

49

Stupid question:
Did NVIDIA change something or did the Kernel dev(s) change something (I know Linus doesn’t do it all by himself :wink: ) since there is such a clean break between 5.9 and newer kernels regarding NVIDIA and bugs?

I know from my experience in Windows that it tends to be about 50 / 50 in cases of MS changing something screwing up backwards compatibility, and a driver or app (usually a game) using / taking advantage of a flaw or “loophole” in Windows code that was never meant to be there that then gets fixed that breaks the app or game or driver. Which means the fault isn’t really anybody’s other than maybe that the game devs need to be more no the ball patching their game.

50

as far as I know it would create a pacnew file if you manually edit the file before.

51

hm, I already made that error once, with grub.cfg, lost all EOS customization to grub :slight_smile:
I’m now checking with meld all the changes to pacnew files before overwriting…

In case it happens to lightdm.conf and/or mkinitcpio.conf, I’ll confirm the changes first… Thanks joekamprad, I’ll always double check it

52

because of that we do have this included in welcome, so you can easely check pacnew files from time to time, i do find meld also comfortable to check.

2 Likes
53

It’s perfect, that was a very good addon indeed…
Welcome app is very welcome :slight_smile:

4 Likes
54

Kernel updates might cause instability if nvidia drivers are not in sync with the kernel.
So using package nvidia-dkms instead of both nvidia and nvidia-lts should be more stable.

That’s the theory anyway…

Which Nvidia drivers do you have in your machines?

pacman -Qs nvidia
1 Like
55

I’m using nvidia-dkms, installed with ´sudo nvidia-installer-dkms´

56

Are you sure you don’t have other nvidia drivers installed? Unfortunately that is not prevented…

57

I’m not 100% sure…

First boot, my resolution was a mess, after using the command above, and perform all the enhancements steps in the wiki, rebooted and it was fullhd…
So I guess I have only the nvidia-dkms installed

[marcelo@eos ~]$ pacman -Qs nvidia
local/egl-wayland 1.1.6-1
    EGLStream-based Wayland external platform
local/lib32-libvdpau 1.4-1
    Nvidia VDPAU library
local/lib32-nvidia-utils 460.67-1
    NVIDIA drivers utilities (32-bit)
local/libvdpau 1.4-1
    Nvidia VDPAU library
local/libxnvctrl 460.67-1
    NVIDIA NV-CONTROL X extension
local/nvidia-dkms 460.67-1
    NVIDIA drivers - module sources
local/nvidia-installer-db 2.4.19-1
    Database for the script to setup nvidia drivers in EndeavourOS
local/nvidia-installer-dkms 3.3.8-3
    Script to setup nvidia drivers (dkms version) in EndeavourOS
local/nvidia-settings 460.67-1
    Tool for configuring the NVIDIA graphics driver
local/nvidia-utils 460.67-1
    NVIDIA drivers utilities
local/nvtop 1.1.0-2
    An htop like monitoring tool for NVIDIA GPUs
[marcelo@eos ~]$
58

Yes, looks like nvidia-dkms only. So that should (theoretically) be OK.

For me, sometimes the DM causes problems. Then switching to another DM seems to help for some unknown reason. Worth a try anyway.

1 Like
59

You forgot the -n option.
sudo nvidia-installer-dkms -n

The -n uninstalls Nvidia drivers and installs nouveau. Works a treat as long as you aren’t gaming or have one of the latest and greatest Nvidia GPUs. If you are gaming then you have to fight the Nvida Battle Evermore. Ohh, sounds like the title of a game.

Pudge

3 Likes
60

This is what I did, and I notice absolutely ZERO performance difference in everyday heavy use. Plus all screen tearing has disappeared.

In fact i would go so far as to say that if you are not gaming or say use Linux to render 3D models or such, never bother with the proprietary drivers. That’s how much better my experience has been. For example this bug never happened to me :wink:

3 Likes
61

Hm, nice to know about the -n option, does the nouveau driver support hardware acceleration in browsers?
I’m not playing games in Linux…

I’ve been doing the play-with-mpv and streamlink stuff to get hardware acceleration…