Centos7 Frozen

[nmrdukeman]

Hi,
I know it is a recurring question so please bear with me.
I have a Centos 7 7.5.1804 (core) with Kernel: 3.10.0-862.11.6el7.x86_64, and NVidia P2000 with drvier nvidia-x11-drv-x86_64 390.87-1.el7.elrepo.
Recently, the system crashed on average once a week I would say. The mouse was frozen,and ctrl-alt-backspace did not work either. I had to do hard-reboot by turning off and on the power of the pc.
I have talked to the company who sold us the computer, and they said I probably need to update my nvidia driver. So my questions are:
1. Is the nvidia driver needed to be updated and is it the culprit of the problem?
2. I did some research on updating the driver. Instead of going directly to NVIIDA to download and install the driver, one should try go to Centos7 and download and update the driver from there? Can I use the installed NVIDIA service gui to go that.

Thanks for your help and insight.

Best,
Dukeman

[TrevorH]

Your system is fairly backlevel since 7.6 came out about 6 months ago and you're still on 7.5. You should run yum update on a regular basis to check if there are any new patches and to install them if there are.

The best way to use the nvidia drivers on CentOS is to use the ELRepo third party yum repo. They supply an elrepo-release package that you install which tells yum about a new repo and enables it. Once that's done, yum install nvidia-detect and then run nvidia-detect and it will tell you which of the ELRepo kmod-nvidia packages to use for your graphics card.

You'll need to uninstall the nvidia drivers that you are using now - presumably installed directly using their downloadable .run file? If so then run it again with --help and it will tell you how to run it to uninstall (--uninstall I think but I don't have a copy to try). Do that then reboot and install ELRepo's copy (probably easier to install the elrepo-release and run nvidia-detect before you do that bit!).