Can't run Nvidia driver on 18.03

Netrunner Netrunner Desktop 18.03
1

I have an Nvidia GTX970.
After installing Netrunner 18.03, I started it as usual with the nouveau driver (normally with noaccel=1, this time it was more buggy and I used nomodeset). Then I moved on to installing the nvidia-driver package, and apt completed without errors. After reboot though, I noticed that nouveau was getting loaded. I’m no expert, but I expected a few related symlinks in /etc/modprobe.d that are not there.
Has anyone else experienced this with Nvidia and the latest Netrunner?

2

How did you install the nvidia driver? The packages from the ubuntu repo should take care of marking nouveau as blacklisted.
Have you tried uninstalling and reinstalling?

3

I understand the driver comes from the Debian testing snapshot included in Netrunner.
I run

apt install nvidia-driver

It worked as expected in my previous installations of Netrunner.
With 18.03 the installation completes normally, but nouveau appears not to be blacklisted.
Later I can post the content of my old /etc/modprobe.d, where two symlinks for nvidia and blacklisting nouveau appeared. They are not there in the new installation.
I also tried uninstalling and reinstalling with no change.

4

I can add that I also tried installing KDE neon, which is based on Ubuntu instead of Debian.
In that case, after installing the Nvidia driver and rebooting, everything works as expected.

5

Of course it does. I mixed up Maui and Netrunner forum. Sorry

[quote]
It worked as expected in my previous installations of Netrunner.
With 18.03 the installation completes normally, but nouveau appears not to be blacklisted.
Later I can post the content of my old /etc/modprobe.d, where two symlinks for nvidia and blacklisting [/quote]
So seems to be a regression in the debian packaging.
Maybe you can report it directly to the package you tried.

In the meanwhile add the blacklist for nouveau manually and see if it makes it work.

6

So, I tried to activate the rolling repos to get a more recent version of the Nvidia drivers, but no joy.
So I looked into my previous Netrunner installation that I backed up and found two symlinks that were not there in the new installation:

/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf -> /etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf
/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf -> /etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia-modprobe.conf

I also added

/etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf -> /etc/nvidia/nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf
/etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia-bug-report.sh -> /usr/lib/nvidia/nvidia-bug-report.sh*
/etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf -> /etc/nvidia/nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf
/etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia_drv.so -> /usr/lib/nvidia/nvidia_drv.so
/etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia-load.conf -> /etc/nvidia/nvidia-load.conf
/etc/alternatives/glx--nvidia-modprobe.conf -> /etc/nvidia/nvidia-modprobe.conf

The final hardlinks were there already.
glx–nvidia-blacklists-nouveau.conf would actually blacklist nouveau.
Still, when I rebooted, nouveau was loaded instead of nvidia.

I should probably do more digging, but now I need a working system.
I’ll probably move to KDE neon for now.

7

Neon is far worse.

8

I don’t like it much either, but nvidia drivers currently install fine on ubuntu.
On debian apparently they don’t.

9

So my suggestion installing the nvidia driver manually from the nvidia site. But be aware of this issue: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=902773

So setting the kernel parameter slab_common.usercopy_fallback=y will help. (Just add it to the parameters in /etc/default/grub’s GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT)