Nvidia linux driver arch

NVIDIA

This article covers the proprietary NVIDIA graphics card driver. For the open-source driver, see Nouveau. If you have a laptop with hybrid Intel/NVIDIA graphics, see NVIDIA Optimus instead.

Contents

Installation

These instructions are for those using the stock linux or linux-lts packages. For custom kernel setup, skip to the next subsection.

1. If you do not know what graphics card you have, find out by issuing:

2. Determine the necessary driver version for your card by:

• finding the code name (e.g. NV50, NVC0, etc.) on Nouveau wiki’s code names page
• looking up the name in NVIDIA’s legacy card list: if your card is not there you can use the latest driver
• visiting NVIDIA’s driver download site

3. Install the appropriate driver for your card:

• For GeForce 630-900, 10-20, and Quadro/Tesla/Tegra K-series cards and newer [NVE0, NV110 and newer family cards from around 2010 and later], install the nvidia package (for use with the linux kernel) or nvidia-lts (for use with the linux-lts kernel) package.

• If these packages do not work, nvidia-betaAUR may have a newer driver version that offers support.

• For GeForce 400/500/600 series cards [NVCx and NVDx] from around 2010-2011, install the nvidia-390xx-dkmsAUR package.

• For even older cards (released in 2010 or earlier), have a look at #Unsupported drivers.

4. For 32-bit application support, also install the corresponding lib32 nvidia package from the multilib repository (e.g. lib32-nvidia-utils ).

5. Reboot. The nvidia package contains a file which blacklists the nouveau module, so rebooting is necessary.

Once the driver has been installed, continue to #Xorg configuration.

Unsupported drivers

If you have a GeForce 300 series card or older (released in 2010 or earlier), Nvidia no longer supports drivers for your card. This means that these drivers do not support the current Xorg version. It thus might be easier if you use the Nouveau driver, which supports the old cards with the current Xorg.

However, Nvidia’s legacy drivers are still available and might provide better 3D performance/stability if you are willing to downgrade Xorg:

• For GeForce 8/9, ION and 100-300 series cards [NV5x, NV8x, NV9x and NVAx], install the nvidia-340xx-dkmsAUR package. Last supported Xorg version is 1.20.
• GeForce 7 series cards and older [NV6x, NV4x and lower] do not have a driver packaged for Arch Linux.

Custom kernel

If you are using a custom kernel, compilation of the Nvidia kernel modules can be automated with DKMS.

Install the nvidia-dkms package (or a specific branch). The Nvidia module will be rebuilt after every Nvidia or kernel update thanks to the DKMS pacman hook.

DRM kernel mode setting

nvidia 364.16 adds support for DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) kernel mode setting. To enable this feature, add the nvidia-drm.modeset=1 kernel parameter. For basic functionality that should suffice, if you want to ensure it’s loaded at the earliest possible occasion, or are noticing startup issues you can add nvidia , nvidia_modeset , nvidia_uvm and nvidia_drm to the initramfs according to Mkinitcpio#MODULES.

If added to the initramfs do not forget to run mkinitcpio every time there is a nvidia driver update. See #Pacman hook to automate these steps.

Pacman hook

To avoid the possibility of forgetting to update initramfs after an NVIDIA driver upgrade, you may want to use a pacman hook:

Make sure the Target package set in this hook is the one you’ve installed in steps above (e.g. nvidia , nvidia-dkms , nvidia-lts or nvidia-ck-something ).

Hardware accelerated video decoding

NVDEC and VDPAU

Accelerated video decoding with VDPAU is supported on GeForce 8 series cards and newer. Accelerated video decoding with NVDEC is supported on Fermi cards and newer. See hardware video acceleration for details.

Accelerated decoding of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 videos via XvMC are supported on GeForce4, GeForce 5 FX, GeForce 6 and GeForce 7 series cards. See XvMC for details.

Xorg configuration

The proprietary NVIDIA graphics card driver does not need any Xorg server configuration file. You can start X to see if the Xorg server will function correctly without a configuration file. However, it may be required to create a configuration file (prefer /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/20-nvidia.conf over /etc/X11/xorg.conf ) in order to adjust various settings. This configuration can be generated by the NVIDIA Xorg configuration tool, or it can be created manually. If created manually, it can be a minimal configuration (in the sense that it will only pass the basic options to the Xorg server), or it can include a number of settings that can bypass Xorg’s auto-discovered or pre-configured options.

Automatic configuration

The NVIDIA package includes an automatic configuration tool to create an Xorg server configuration file ( xorg.conf ) and can be run by:

This command will auto-detect and create (or edit, if already present) the /etc/X11/xorg.conf configuration according to present hardware.

If there are instances of DRI, ensure they are commented out:

Double check your /etc/X11/xorg.conf to make sure your default depth, horizontal sync, vertical refresh, and resolutions are acceptable.

nvidia-settings

The nvidia-settings tool lets you configure many options using either CLI or GUI. Running nvidia-settings without any options launches the GUI, for CLI options see nvidia-settings(1) .

You can run the CLI/GUI as a non-root user and save the settings to

/.nvidia-settings-rc or save it as xorg.conf by using the option Save to X configuration File for a multi-user environment.

/.nvidia-settings-rc for the current user:

See Autostarting to start this command on every boot.

/.nvidia-settings-rc and/or Xorg file(s) should recover normal startup.

Manual configuration

Several tweaks (which cannot be enabled automatically or with nvidia-settings) can be performed by editing your configuration file. The Xorg server will need to be restarted before any changes are applied.

Minimal configuration

A basic configuration block in 20-nvidia.conf (or deprecated in xorg.conf ) would look like this:

Disabling the logo on startup

Add the «NoLogo» option under section Device :

Overriding monitor detection

The «ConnectedMonitor» option under section Device allows to override monitor detection when X server starts, which may save a significant amount of time at start up. The available options are: «CRT» for analog connections, «DFP» for digital monitors and «TV» for televisions.

The following statement forces the NVIDIA driver to bypass startup checks and recognize the monitor as DFP:

Enabling brightness control

Add under section Device :

If brightness control still does not work with this option, try installing nvidia-bl AUR or nvidiabl AUR [broken link: package not found] .

Enabling SLI

Taken from the NVIDIA driver’s README Appendix B: This option controls the configuration of SLI rendering in supported configurations. A «supported configuration» is a computer equipped with an SLI-Certified Motherboard and 2 or 3 SLI-Certified GeForce GPUs. See NVIDIA’s SLI Zone [dead link 2020-04-01 ⓘ] for more information.

Find the first GPU’s PCI Bus ID using lspci :

Add the BusID (3 in the previous example) under section Device :

Add the desired SLI rendering mode value under section Screen :

The following table presents the available rendering modes.

Alternatively, you can use the nvidia-xconfig utility to insert these changes into xorg.conf with a single command:

To verify that SLI mode is enabled from a shell:

and comment out the PrimaryGPU option in your xorg.d configuration,

Using this configuration may also solve any graphical boot issues.

Multiple monitors

See Multihead for more general information.

Using nvidia-settings

The nvidia-settings tool can configure multiple monitors.

For CLI configuration, first get the CurrentMetaMode by running:

Save everything after the :: to the end of the attribute (in this case: DPY-1: 2880×1620 @2880×1620 +0+0 ) and use to reconfigure your displays with nvidia-settings —assign «CurrentMetaMode=your_meta_mode» .

ConnectedMonitor

If the driver does not properly detect a second monitor, you can force it to do so with ConnectedMonitor.

The duplicated device with Screen is how you get X to use two monitors on one card without TwinView . Note that nvidia-settings will strip out any ConnectedMonitor options you have added.

TwinView

You want only one big screen instead of two. Set the TwinView argument to 1 . This option should be used if you desire compositing. TwinView only works on a per card basis, when all participating monitors are connected to the same card.

If you have multiple cards that are SLI capable, it is possible to run more than one monitor attached to separate cards (for example: two cards in SLI with one monitor attached to each). The «MetaModes» option in conjunction with SLI Mosaic mode enables this. Below is a configuration which works for the aforementioned example and runs GNOME flawlessly.

Vertical sync using TwinView

If you are using TwinView and vertical sync (the «Sync to VBlank» option in nvidia-settings), you will notice that only one screen is being properly synced, unless you have two identical monitors. Although nvidia-settings does offer an option to change which screen is being synced (the «Sync to this display device» option), this does not always work. A solution is to add the following environment variables at startup, for example append in /etc/profile :

You can change DFP-0 with your preferred screen ( DFP-0 is the DVI port and CRT-0 is the VGA port). You can find the identifier for your display from nvidia-settings in the «X Server XVideoSettings» section.

Gaming using TwinView

In case you want to play fullscreen games when using TwinView, you will notice that games recognize the two screens as being one big screen. While this is technically correct (the virtual X screen really is the size of your screens combined), you probably do not want to play on both screens at the same time.

To correct this behavior for SDL, try:

For OpenGL, add the appropriate Metamodes to your xorg.conf in section Device and restart X:

Another method that may either work alone or in conjunction with those mentioned above is starting games in a separate X server.

Mosaic mode

Mosaic mode is the only way to use more than 2 monitors across multiple graphics cards with compositing. Your window manager may or may not recognize the distinction between each monitor. Mosaic mode requires a valid SLI configuration. Even if using Base mode without SLI, the GPUs must still be SLI capable/compatible.

Base Mosaic

Base Mosaic mode works on any set of Geforce 8000 series or higher GPUs. It cannot be enabled from within the nvidia-setting GUI. You must either use the nvidia-xconfig command line program or edit xorg.conf by hand. Metamodes must be specified. The following is an example for four DFPs in a 2×2 configuration, each running at 1920×1024, with two DFPs connected to two cards:

SLI Mosaic

If you have an SLI configuration and each GPU is a Quadro FX 5800, Quadro Fermi or newer then you can use SLI Mosaic mode. It can be enabled from within the nvidia-settings GUI or from the command line with:

Tips and tricks

This article or section is a candidate for moving to NVIDIA/Tips and tricks.

Preserve video memory after suspend

This article or section needs language, wiki syntax or style improvements. See Help:Style for reference.

By default the NVIDIA Linux drivers save and restore only essential video memory allocations on system suspend and resume. Quoting NVIDIA ([4], also available with the nvidia-utils package in /usr/share/doc/nvidia/html/powermanagement.html): The resulting loss of video memory contents is partially compensated for by the user-space NVIDIA drivers, and by some applications, but can lead to failures such as rendering corruption and application crashes upon exit from power management cycles.

This article or section needs expansion.

The new, still experimental, system enables saving all video memory (given enough space on disk or main RAM). The interface is through the /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend file as follows: write «suspend» (or «hibernate») to /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend immediately before writing to the usual Linux /sys/power/state file, write «resume» to /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend immediately after waking up, or after an unsuccessful attempt to suspend or hibernate.

The NVIDIA drivers rely on a user defined file system for storage. The chosen file system needs to support unnamed temporary files (ext4 works) and have sufficient capacity for storing the video memory allocations (e.g., at least (sum of the memory capacities of all NVIDIA GPUs) * 1.2 ). Use the command nvidia-smi -q -d MEMORY to list the memory capacities of all GPUs in the system.

To choose the file system used for storing video memory during system sleep (and change the default video memory save/restore strategy to save and restore all video memory allocations), it is necessary to pass two options to the «nvidia» kernel module. For example, write the following line to /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-power-management.conf and reboot:

Replace «/tmp-nvidia» in the previous line with a path within your desired file system.

The interaction with /proc/driver/nvidia/suspend is handled by the simple Unix shell script at /usr/bin/nvidia-sleep.sh, which will itself be called by a tool like Systemd. The Archlinux nvidia-utils package ships with the following relevant Systemd services (which essentially just call nvidia-sleep.sh): nvidia-suspend , nvidia-hibernate , nvidia-resume . Contrary to NVIDIA’s instructions, it is currently not necessary to enable nvidia-resume (and it’s in fact probably not a good idea to enable it), because the /usr/lib/systemd/system-sleep/nvidia script does the same thing as the service (but slightly earlier), and it is enabled by default (Systemd calls it after waking up from a suspend). Do enable nvidia-suspend and/or nvidia-hibernate .

Driver persistence

Nvidia has a daemon that can be optionally run at boot. In a standard single-GPU X desktop environment the persistence daemon is not needed and can actually create issues [5]. See the Driver Persistence section of the Nvidia documentation for more details.

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