disabling nouveau - users - Fedora mailing-lists

10 Sep 2019


      My goal is to install nvidia cuda for some machine learning on a new Lenovo Thinkpad P52S laptop 
running Fedora 30. The laptop comes with both an integrated intel card and an nvidia quadro P500 card 
(I think this is called Optimus). I want to use the intel card for display and the nvidia exclusively 
for machine learning.
I've followed various tutorials and blogs on the web, most notably
the rpmfusion howto: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA
and a recent fedora magazine article: https://fedoramagazine.org/install-nvidia-gpu/
The latter says (in the comments) that there is no need to disable nouveau but I had to do that in 
the past every time I installed the nvidia drivers, so I'm trying to do that now as well.
So I did the following:
1. Installed the nvidia rpms:
dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia akmod-nvidia
which installed the following + dependencies:
[root@thinkpad ~]# rpm -qa | grep -i nvidia
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64
nvidia-settings-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64
akmod-nvidia-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-kmodsrc-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64
2. The dnf install command modified the boot options, to blacklist nouveau:
[root@thinkpad ~]# cat /etc/default/grub 
GRUB_TIMEOUT=5
GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)"
GRUB_DEFAULT=saved
GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true
GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console"
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1 resume=UUID=d1406222-e963-4043-a6f9-10c784752ed8 rhgb quiet"
GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true"
GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true
3. I read that is not enough though, as if nouveau is in the initram disk it will still do modeset = 1, 
so I blacklisted it in modprobe.d and created a new initram disk:
[root@thinkpad ~]# cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_nouveau.conf 
blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
# backup nouveau initram disk
[root@thinkpad boot]# cp initramfs-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64.img initramfs-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64_nouveau.img
# create new one:
[root@thinkpad boot]# dracut --force
Now 
[root@thinkpad boot]# lsinitrd initramfs-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64.img | grep -i nouveau
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root           44 Feb 14  2019 etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_nouveau.conf
drwxr-xr-x   2 root     root            0 Feb 14  2019 usr/lib/modules/5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau
-rw-r--r--   1 root     root       636252 Feb 14  2019 usr/lib/modules/5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau.ko.xz
so it picked up the blacklist_nouveau.conf file.
4. set runlevel 3
systemctl set-default multi-user.target
5. I'm running Xorg, not Wayland:
[root@thinkpad ~]# pidof xinit
1351
[root@thinkpad ~]# pidof Xwayland
[root@thinkpad ~]#
6. Reboot. Even before starting X, I still get nouveau:
[root@thinkpad ~]# lsmod | grep nouveau
nouveau              2265088  0
mxm_wmi                16384  1 nouveau
ttm                   118784  1 nouveau
i2c_algo_bit           16384  2 i915,nouveau
drm_kms_helper        225280  2 i915,nouveau
drm                   495616  8 drm_kms_helper,i915,ttm,nouveau
wmi                    36864  4 intel_wmi_thunderbolt,wmi_bmof,mxm_wmi,nouveau
video                  49152  3 thinkpad_acpi,i915,nouveau
I can, however modprobe -r nouveau and things seem OK.
But what do I do to have it not load on boot? When this happened in the past, as a last resort, 
I removed the appropriate rpms, but now the nouveau driver seems to be part of the kernel-modules 
package:
[root@thinkpad ~]# rpm -qf /usr/lib/modules/5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau.ko.xz kernel-modules-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64
Any help on this, anyone? Thanks!