hello everyone, I have just installed Fedora 33 workstation on my laptop. I have never had an additional graphics card on a pc and want some guidance as to what I am supposed to do. This is a Dell XPS 9550, which has the integrated Intel HD Graphics 530, and the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M. When will the laptop be using the NVIDIA card? Is this graphics card now working on my new installation? Regarding installation of drivers: Does Fedora already carry a default driver for this graphics card? Do I need to install a driver? I have noticed there is a specific repository for NVIDIA graphics cards drivers (rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver), which provides the Nouveau driver. Should I install this repository and a specific package contained in it? Does NVIDIA provide another driver for this card in linux? Would this be recommended over the open source alternative for any reason?
thanks very much,
On 17/03/2021 17:14, Anil Felipe Duggirala wrote:
hello everyone, I have just installed Fedora 33 workstation on my laptop. I have never had an additional graphics card on a pc and want some guidance as to what I am supposed to do. This is a Dell XPS 9550, which has the integrated Intel HD Graphics 530, and the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M. When will the laptop be using the NVIDIA card? Is this graphics card now working on my new installation? Regarding installation of drivers: Does Fedora already carry a default driver for this graphics card? Do I need to install a driver? I have noticed there is a specific repository for NVIDIA graphics cards drivers (rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver), which provides the Nouveau driver. Should I install this repository and a specific package contained in it? Does NVIDIA provide another driver for this card in linux? Would this be recommended over the open source alternative for any reason?
thanks very much,
I don't have direct experience of dual-graphic systems, but this would be a good starting point:
https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA
The usual reason for using the rpmfusion packages is that they work,
HTH
John P
On Wed, 17 Mar 2021 at 14:14, Anil Felipe Duggirala < anilduggirala@fastmail.fm> wrote:
hello everyone, I have just installed Fedora 33 workstation on my laptop. I have never had an additional graphics card on a pc and want some guidance as to what I am supposed to do.
This is a Dell XPS 9550, which has the integrated Intel HD Graphics 530,
and the discrete NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M. When will the laptop be using the NVIDIA card? Is this graphics card now working on my new installation?
You have "hybrid graphics": https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hybrid_graphics. For laptops there is usually a video switch that connects the "active" graphics device to the display, and can switch from discrete to integrated graphics to save power. As the article notes, linux support is "experimental", especially if you use wayland.
"sudo lshw -c video" or "sudo lspci -k | grep -A 4 -i 'VGA'" should show
the driver used with each graphics device.
Regarding installation of drivers:
Does Fedora already carry a default driver for this graphics card? Do I need to install a driver?
Fedora uses the "nouveau" driver for NVIDIA devices. It is based on reverse engineering, so is not as capable as the NVIDIA drivers, which you can get from rpmfusion.
I have noticed there is a specific repository for NVIDIA graphics cards drivers
(rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver), which provides the Nouveau driver.
Should
I install this repository and a specific package contained in it?
If nouveau is adequate for your purposes you should consider continuing to use it but be prepared to file a bug report when you find something that doesn't work adequately so nouveau can be improved. I have a 10+ year old desktop with a basic NVIDIA card. A simple mistake in a 5.8 kernel update broke support for my card and it took until 5.11 to get nouveau working again, so I was stuck on a 5.8 kernel for a couple months.
Does NVIDIA provide another driver for this card in linux? Would this be recommended
over the open source alternative for any reason?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME has a good description of the linux support for hybrid graphics with X11.
Some people keep the display on integrated graphics so they can use the discrete graphics hardware for numerical computations.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2021, at 4:33 PM, George N. White III wrote:
You have "hybrid graphics": https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Hybrid_graphics. For laptops there is usually a video switch that connects the "active" graphics device to the display, and can switch from discrete to integrated graphics to save power. As the article notes, linux support is "experimental", especially if you use wayland.
Thank you George. Ok. So this tells me I should probably not play around a lot with this because it is not fully supported anyway.
"sudo lshw -c video" or "sudo lspci -k | grep -A 4 -i 'VGA'" should show the driver used with each graphics device.
Running this command is only listed my integrated graphics card: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 (rev 06) DeviceName: Onboard IGD Subsystem: Dell XPS 15 9550 Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: i915
Fedora uses the "nouveau" driver for NVIDIA devices. It is based on reverse engineering, so is not as capable as the NVIDIA drivers, which you can get from rpmfusion.
Does the Nouveau driver come preinstalled in F33 ? I can see that the xorg-x11-drv-nouveau package is installed. I can see that there are some messages related to nouveau at startup (some regarding FAULTs).
[ 23.459057] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Enabling HDA controller [ 23.748533] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bus: MMIO read of 00000000 FAULT at 619444 [ IBUS ] [ 24.777227] Lockdown: systemd-logind: hibernation is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7 [ 24.993183] rfkill: input handler disabled [ 5632.296051] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Enabling HDA controller [ 5632.436013] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bus: MMIO read of 00000000 FAULT at 619444 [ IBUS ] [ 5632.441268] rfkill: input handler enabled [ 5633.370231] Bluetooth: RFCOMM TTY layer initialized [ 5633.370238] Bluetooth: RFCOMM socket layer initialized [ 5633.370286] Bluetooth: RFCOMM ver 1.11 [ 5633.787447] Lockdown: systemd-logind: hibernation is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7 [ 5634.167385] rfkill: input handler disabled [ 5634.853782] Lockdown: fwupd: /dev/mem,kmem,port is restricted; see man kernel_lockdown.7 [ 6210.389089] nf_conntrack: default automatic helper assignment has been turned off for security reasons and CT-based firewall rule not found. Use the iptables CT target to attach helpers instead. [ 6580.500370] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Enabling HDA controller [ 6580.640022] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bus: MMIO read of 00000000 FAULT at 619444 [ IBUS ]
If nouveau is adequate for your purposes you should consider continuing to use it but
So I will ask the previous question again. Does this driver come preinstalled? Or do I need to activate these Third Party Repositories offered by the Gnome Software app (rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.repo)? Once I activate this repository, do I need to install a specific package for my graphics card?
Does NVIDIA provide another driver for this card in linux? Would this be recommended over the open source alternative for any reason?
https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/PRIME has a good description of the linux support for hybrid graphics with X11.
I dont understand how this answers my question. Reading the PRIME article just tells me that it is up to me whether I want to use the proprietary or the open source drivers. I think this is way above my level of understanding. As I said before, this is the first time I own a laptop with a discrete graphics card.
Thanks very much.
On 3/26/21 5:00 PM, Anil Felipe Duggirala wrote:
On Wed, Mar 17, 2021, at 4:33 PM, George N. White III wrote:
"sudo lshw -c video" or "sudo lspci -k | grep -A 4 -i 'VGA'" should show the driver used with each graphics device.
Running this command is only listed my integrated graphics card: 00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 530 (rev 06) DeviceName: Onboard IGD Subsystem: Dell XPS 15 9550 Kernel driver in use: i915 Kernel modules: i915
Try "lspci -k | grep -A 4 -i 'nvidia'"
Fedora uses the "nouveau" driver for NVIDIA devices. It is based on reverse engineering, so is not as capable as the NVIDIA drivers, which you can get from rpmfusion.
Does the Nouveau driver come preinstalled in F33 ? I can see that the xorg-x11-drv-nouveau package is installed. I can see that there are some messages related to nouveau at startup (some regarding FAULTs).
[ 23.459057] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Enabling HDA controller [ 23.748533] nouveau 0000:01:00.0: bus: MMIO read of 00000000 FAULT at 619444 [ IBUS ]
The nouveau driver is included with the kernel, those messages are from that driver.
If nouveau is adequate for your purposes you should consider continuing to use it but
So I will ask the previous question again. Does this driver come preinstalled? Or do I need to activate these Third Party Repositories offered by the Gnome Software app (rpmfusion-nonfree-nvidia-driver.repo)? Once I activate this repository, do I need to install a specific package for my graphics card?
That repo is for the proprietary NVidia kernel module and yes, you'll have to install a particular package and I don't know which one for sure, but you could try "akmod-nvidia".
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Anil Felipe Duggirala -
George N. White III -
John Pilkington -
Samuel Sieb