Nvidia drivers not working on brand new centos 7 workstation

[lpallard]

Hello,

I was running centos 6.5 (later upgraded to 6.6) but because some applications were ancient and I couldnt get support (too old), I decided to reinstall fresh with centos 7. I am using KDE as my default desktop env instead of the atrocity of gnome now shipping with Centos.. I am trying to upgrade from nouveau to the proprietary driver nvidia because I am getting performance issues with nouveau and I'd like to have granular control over my dual head display settings.

The problem is that I cannot get it to run. I use yum to install the nvidia driver with the assumption that it will

1. disable nouveau
2. survive a kernel upgrade

instead of manually disabling nouveau and installing the nvidia driver manually.

After running "yum install kmod-nvidia" it downloads the driver, work for about 2 minutes and then issues a warning that "xorg-x11-glamor" is conflicting with nvidia and it suggests to remove it. So logically my first reaction was to let the nvidia install finish, then proceed to remove "xorg-x11-glamor" with "yum erase..."

All went well until a reboot. After the POST, the default kernel is booted up and then monitors are going blank and then enter powersave mode. Then nothing happens. To mitigate this, I had to hard reset, select the rescue kernel, then uninstall nvidia and reinstall "xorg-x11-glamor". All went fine but Im still using nouveau.

Thanks

[toracat]

If you have not already, I suggest you set up theELRepo repository. Then install the nvidia-detect package and run it. Please post the output of the command nvidia-detect.

[lpallard]

There you go !

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[root@workstation workstation-user]# nvidia-detect                                                                                            
Probing for supported NVIDIA devices...                                                                                                       
[10de:0de0] NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 440]                                                                                         
This device requires the current 346.35 NVIDIA driver kmod-nvidia

Funny because if I do a search kmod-nvidia with YUM I get

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kmod-nvidia.x86_64 : nvidia kernel module(s)
kmod-nvidia-304xx.x86_64 : nvidia-304xx kernel module(s)
kmod-nvidia-340xx.x86_64 : nvidia-340xx kernel module(s)

None of them are up to release 346.XX

[lpallard]

Just an idea but before I try and screw up my machine (which I desperatly need right now for some work) maybe just running "yum install kmod-nvidia" actually installed

kmod-nvidia.x86_64

and NOT

kmod-nvidia-340xx.x86_64

which it is what I really need??

[toracat]

346.35 is still in the elrepo-testing repository. It's supposed to be released real soon now. But you're right, the stuff in the testing repo should not be provided by nvidia-detect. I think the plan was to release this latest version as soon as all testing looked good.

[lpallard]

The question is:

should I wait for 346.35 to be pushed to the stable repo (not testing) or should I go ahead and install kmod-nvidia-340xx ??

[toracat]

I recommend you go ahead and install the 346.35 release by doing a 'yum --enablerepo=elrepo-testing'. I've been running it on two machines with no issues.

[lpallard]

This is weird...

I tried running "yum search all --enablerepo=elrepo-testing kmod-nvidia"

but it didnt find 346.35..

I tried enabling the repo in yum.repos.d/elrepo.repo but to no avail..

Then I went to http://elrepo.org/linux/testing/el7/x86_64/RPMS/ and I see the package there... Why is YUM not seeing the package from the tsting repo? I also tried cleaning the cache, and updating but dint help..

[toracat]

Can you try a 'yum list' like so:

Code: Select all

yum --enablerepo=elrepo-testing list kmod-nvidia

[lpallard]

OK I managed to install as you suggested but its still not working.

This is exactly what I did:

-run "yum install --enablerepo=elrepo-testing kmod-nvidia" and confirmed it was indeed 346.35 being installed.
-it complained that "xorg-x11-glamor" was conflicting so I waited for the nvidia driver install to finish, then uninstalled glamor with "yum erase xorg-x11-glamor"
-rebooted
-kernel selection menu appears, I let the default kernel boot
-I see 4 tuxes (penguins)
-blank screens for a second then they go to powersave mode

a hard reboot is necessary at this point.

-Rebooted
-selected the rescue kernel from the select menu
-saw the 4 penguins
-blank screens with blinking cursor (will stay there forever)
-did ctrl+alt+F3 then a login shell appeared
-logged in as root
-uninstalled the nvidia driver
-reinstalled "xorg-x11-glamor"
-rebooted

All is fine.

What the ** is going on!!?