Nvidia Driver Snarl After Discover update

[petrux]

Upon rebooting after a big Discover update on 24.04, including the kernel and a host of Nvidia packages (more than one driver?), the display is now a low resolution 1024 single screen (I have 2). The Driver Manager window in System Settings is now grayed out, and the two listed drivers, Nvidia 470 and Nouveau are not accessible. Instead, there is a third "Continue using manually installed driver" (Graphics Processor: llvmpipe) as the only option.

From a screen capture during shutdown, and system log:

Starting colord.service - Manage, *stall and Generate Color Profiles...
OK ] Finished plymouth-quit-service - Terminate Plumouth Boot Screen.
NVRM: The NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 GPU installed in this system is
NVRM: supported through the NVIDIA 470.xx Legacy drivers. Please
NVRM: visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html for more
NVRM: information. The 535.309.01 NVIDIA driver will ignore
NVRM: this GPU. Continuing probe...
NVRM: No NVIDIA GPU found.

I’ve been using the Nouveau driver for a very long time and really just want it back. I don’t need the Nvidia 470 driver at this time, but don’t mind if its available.
I did

sudo apt update
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo apt install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

Which went fine since all was already updated and Nouveau installed, but it did not register in the Driver Manager upon reboot.

The Nvidia 470 driver shows up with a grep, and there also seems to be a Nvidia 535 installed – could that be the problem?

I’m at a loss on how to proceed as I don’t know what’s going on and don’t want to make a bigger problem.
I'd appreciate any insights...

[Schwarzer Kater]

Well, like it says in your screen capture:
only the 470 driver supports your graphics card and the installed 535 driver ignores your GPU…


First make sure the nouveau driver is installed.
Then to remove everything NVIDIA try
sudo apt purge nvidia-*
in the Konsole terminal emulator and reboot.
The nouveau driver should be used automatically afterwards.
You could then also reinstall the 470 series driver, if you wish.

If you want to test first what will be removed, you can do so by
sudo apt purge --dry-run nvidia-*

No guarantees - as always with NVIDIA…

[petrux]

Yes, it occurred to me as I was writing that the 535 driver was ignoring the GPU even though the 470 was also installed, but I wasn't sure about cleaning up the mess.
Boy, that purge got rid of a huge mess of files that had been accumulation over the years!

Upon reboot, the Nouveau came up, but somewhat hesitantly with only one screen. Not having figured out how to correct that, reinstalled the 470 driver, and all was good.
But when I tried to switch back to Nouveau, the Driver Manager would not let me, but gave this message:

pk-client-error-quark: The following packages have unmet dependencies:
libwayland-server0: Depends: libffi8 (>= 3.4) but it is not going to be installed
libnvidia-egl-wayland1: Depends: libdrm2 (>= 2.4.66) but it is not going to be installed
Depends: libwayland-client0 (>= 1.20.0) but it is not going to be installed
(268)
How are those dependencies to be met? Is it easy or a big lift? I'm not even sure right now if I'm using Wayland .
Kubuntu has been so trouble-free for me that I lose knowledge of the command line and all the system ins and outs.

I will stick with the 470 for now. Works great, but would like to make Nouveau functional again as well.

[Schwarzer Kater]

[…] I'm not even sure right now if I'm using Wayland […]

To find out whether you are using X11 or Wayland one way is to open Konsole and enter
echo $XDG_SESSION_TYPE


Regarding Kubuntu 24.04 LTS, Wayland and NVIDIA I have to repeat what I already wrote in another thread:

From the Kubuntu 24.04 LTS release notes:
"A Plasma Wayland session is available for testing by installing the plasma-workspace-wayland package, but is not supported. […]"

Escpecially with NVIDIA I would stick to the supported session (X11) in Kubuntu 24.04 LTS if at all possible.
Because NVIDIA drivers combined with Wayland have often caused additional problems in “older” Kubuntu releases (and the older the driver versions, the worse it got IIRC)…


I think you should redefine your goals if someone is to help you with your current problem regarding dependencies (?), e.g.:

• do you want to use Kubuntu 24.04 LTS with X11 or Wayland?
• do you want to use nvidia-driver-470 at all or nouveau? (To be honest, I don't know if a seamless switch between them is possible if nvidia-driver-470 is also installed…)
• your main goal is to use both screens, isn't it?

[petrux]

Good points.

I'm on X11 and will stay there (the opening window of the Info Center says "X11", duh!)

My goal was to have both Nouveau and Nvidia-470 functional and use Nouveau, with 2 screens.
(Before the kernel and drive update, it was Nouveau with 2 screens).

My thinking in the second post was to install the Wayland package, but not activate it, to satisfy the missing dependencies and thus make Nouveau functional as well.
But with the weird Nivdia-Nouveau interactions that you mention and others have encountered, i will forgo that experimentation, KISS.

And, since Nvidia-470 is working well I will stay with it.

Thanks for your help in solving this and straightening out my thinking!

[oldgeek]

I had a similar experience last week. I upgraded through Discover and the Nvidia etc. upgrades changed my graphics completely and eliminated access to my 470 driver, plus putting me on Wayland which I don't use because my driver doesn't support it well at all. I reversed the damage by rolling back to the previous state using btrfs commands. Funny thing I found out: while updating from the terminal, all those Nvidia upgrades were set aside and did not form part of the upgrade, while with Discover they are not held back. Not sure why that is. Are those upgrades buggy? Is that why they were held back? It seems rather odd to me that upgrades which bork the graphic drivers and screen resolution are permitted (at least on Discover) on an LTS release which still has a year of support to go. After all, my graphics card and driver and X11 all work perfectly well on my current system, and I presumed that its configuration would still be supported at least until EOL. With updates like the recent ones described, that looks doubtful to me.

[claydoh]

Nvidia upgrades were set aside and did not form part of the upgrade, while with Discover they are not held back. Not sure why that is

Probably they are/were being phased, or a dependency for them were. It depends on the specific messaging you see. Sometimes an apt session and one run through Discover are seen as different sessions, I think, so the commandline user is being phased, while Discover may present them. Normally in Discover, you don't see mention of updates being phased at all; you just don't get them in your list. Basically, those who primarily use Discover are unaware of phasing at all.

It also could have simply been that not all the packages or dependencies had quite finished migrating to the specific repo mirror server you are getting sent to.

You can usually see what is being phased and various statuses HERE

[oldgeek]

Thanks, Claydoh. I definitely won't use Discover except for updating Flatpak programs as it's not pleasant to have to roll back, even though it's quite easy.