Tag: nvidia

Nvidia proprietary and open source kernel modules

slaanesh 6 Comments

With the latest bunch of updates to the Nvidia and Multimedia repositories, I’ve added the ability to switch to the two implementations of the kernel modules currently available in the Nvidia driver for Linux.

Since almost a year, the Nvidia driver ships with two different implementations of the kernel modules, one proprietary and one open source. The open source one as of drivers 545.x is now considered beta quality also for the workstations, so it seems a good moment to start shipping it.

The open source one is supposed to be the only one that will be kept in the future, but at the moment both are available and both differ in terms of functionality. You can read about the main differences in terms of functionality and what chips they support in the official documentation.

I did not want to introduce another variation of the kernel modules beside akmods, kABI and DKMS, this would have created even more confusion and lots of dependencies in the SPEC files for the variations. The new akmod and DKMS packages ship both sources (MIT/GPL and proprietary kernel modules) and allow you to switch between one or the other through a configuration file.

Considering that in the long run only the open source variant will remain, I wanted to make this as transparent as possible for the users. Basically, if you don’t care and just want something that works, nothing has changed for you.

The two sources get referenced as they are referenced inside the Nvidia run file, namely “kernel” for the original proprietary kernel modules and “kernel-open” for the new open source variation.

The following instructions show you how to switch between one implementation or the other.

DKMS

Check which version you have installed:

# modinfo -l nvidia
NVIDIA

Change the type of modules you want to use and trigger a rebuild and a reinstall:

# sed -i -e 's/kernel$/kernel-open/g' /etc/nvidia/kernel.conf
# dkms build -m nvidia/545.29.02 --force
# dkms install -m nvidia/545.29.02 --force

Now check again the license and you should see that it has changed to MIT/GPL:

# modinfo -l nvidia
Dual MIT/GPL
# reboot

To switch back, change the configuration again and then trigger the same process for rebuilding installing:

# sed -i -e 's/kernel-open$/kernel/g' /etc/nvidia/kernel.conf
# dkms build -m nvidia/545.29.02 --force
# dkms install -m nvidia/545.29.02 --force
# reboot

akmods

Check which version you have installed:

# modinfo -l nvidia
NVIDIA

Change the type of modules you want to use and trigger a rebuild and a reinstall:

# sed -i -e 's/kernel$/kernel-open/g' /etc/nvidia/kernel.conf
# akmods --rebuild

Now check again the license and you should see that it has changed to MIT/GPL:

# modinfo -l nvidia
Dual MIT/GPL
# reboot

To switch back, change the configuration again and then trigger the same process for rebuilding installing:

# sed -i -e 's/kernel-open$/kernel/g' /etc/nvidia/kernel.conf
# akmods --rebuild
# reboot

Wayland/modesetting on Nvidia

slaanesh 37 Comments

With the latest Nvidia drivers it seems that modesetting and Wayland work fine for Gnome and GDM.

Console text is still a normal console, but upon boot you get the native screen resolution in Plymouth and then you can login under both X.org and Wayland sessions.

Screenshot-from-2020-07-11-08-06-56

How to test? Make sure that you have the following line enabled for the nvidia-drm module:

# cat /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf | grep drm
options nvidia-drm modeset=1

And then make sure to comment out the following line in the udev rules supplied by GDM:

# cat /usr/lib/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules | grep -i nvidia
# disable Wayland when using the proprietary nvidia driver
#DRIVER=="nvidia", RUN+="/usr/libexec/gdm-disable-wayland"

Then reboot, and you will login with a Wayland session by default:

# cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/parameters/modeset 
Y
# cat /sys/module/nvidia_drm/version 
450.57
$ lsmod | grep nvidia
nvidia_drm             57344  4
nvidia_modeset       1187840  3 nvidia_drm
nvidia_uvm           1130496  0
nvidia              19726336  208 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_modeset
drm_kms_helper        249856  1 nvidia_drm
drm                   618496  7 drm_kms_helper,nvidia_drm
$ env | grep XDG_SESSION_TYPE
XDG_SESSION_TYPE=wayland
$ lspci | grep -i vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB] (rev a1)