Nvidia, the bane of my existence

Help
7

deep breath

…sigh…

I have just experienced tiers of psychic damage I didn’t know existed. The driver was a red herring the entire time.

Thank you @TLATER for the great help. You are right that modesetting is required for wayland, which I had enabled

It was silly of me to not include the quirks of my laptop. It is an HP OMEN Laptop 15-ce00ni which has the intel iGPU disabled by HP and is unusable. nix run github:eclairevoyant/pcids returns:

PCI:1:0:0
	NVIDIA Corporation [10de]
	GP106BM [GeForce GTX 1060 Mobile 6GB] [1c60]

but out of desperation, and having no idea whether nix was falsely trying to load intel drivers, I did try to disable the iGPU as you have said:

Something interesting I see is that the wiki and the nixos-hardware repo are desynced. The wiki states to just add boot.kernelParams = [ "module_blacklist=i915" ]; but the repo has

  boot.blacklistedKernelModules = lib.mkDefault [ "i915" ];
  # KMS will load the module, regardless of blacklisting
  boot.kernelParams = lib.mkDefault [ "i915.modeset=0" ];

I don’t know which one is required, but I thought I’d point it out.

My specific device is not in the nixos hardware repo, but I had tried to use some options that I saw other HP laptops using

Though as you will see soon this wasn’t the issue. Now that I have a desktop I’ll start testing quirks and see what else there is for this machine.

So…on to the story

I installed nixos onto a separate drive as I want to set up an environment without touching my current system. I was unable to get into desktop because there’s no drivers. I booted into my main system, did research into getting nix set up, created config files and copied them over. Queue this past week of pain. Turns out “unbreakable system” doesn’t include filling up your initrd while testing and nuking the only working generation with nix-garbage-collect -d, hah couldn’t be me, anyway.

After reading your reply I tried the extra options from the hardware repo with no success. Reading the post you linked about their being issues with SDDM in general, I figured I’d try an as ‘default’ setup as I could. I switched kde and sddm for gnome and lightDM. Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t work, so I go to get info from the logs to post here.

Now,I have been on linux for a few years now with different distributions. I still have lots to learn but I have been into journalctl a few times, and seen lots of warnings and errors that log on every boot but never affect anything. Unfortunately this means I have become jaded to warning/error messages of things that I don’t think are the issue.

I checked the lightDM logs, slap them into startpage, land on

And the solution–

…wait…

“I booted into my main system … and copied them over.” - bentenjamin

MOTHER FU- (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻

…sigh…
So after all of this agony the issue was that various permissions were messed up when copying/saving configs from my other DE. And you @TLATER the man(?), the myth, the legend, had already solved my issue, 2 years ago.

Reinstalling nixos and using the most basic config is running perfectly:

{ config, pkgs, ... }:
{
 services.xserver.videoDrivers = [ "nvidia" ];

  #hardware.graphics.enable = true;
  hardware.opengl = {
    enable = true;
    driSupport = true;
    driSupport32Bit = true;
  };
  
  hardware.nvidia = {
    modesetting.enable = true;
    powerManagement.enable = true;
    open = false;
    nvidiaSettings = false;

    package = config.boot.kernelPackages.nvidiaPackages.mkDriver {
      version = "560.35.03";
      sha256_64bit = "sha256-8pMskvrdQ8WyNBvkU/xPc/CtcYXCa7ekP73oGuKfH+M=";
      sha256_aarch64 = "sha256-s8ZAVKvRNXpjxRYqM3E5oss5FdqW+tv1qQC2pDjfG+s=";
      openSha256 = "sha256-/32Zf0dKrofTmPZ3Ratw4vDM7B+OgpC4p7s+RHUjCrg=";
      settingsSha256 = "sha256-kQsvDgnxis9ANFmwIwB7HX5MkIAcpEEAHc8IBOLdXvk=";
      persistencedSha256 = "sha256-E2J2wYYyRu7Kc3MMZz/8ZIemcZg68rkzvqEwFAL3fFs=";
    };
  };
}

It is frustrating that I couldn’t look past the nvidia/DM error logs to find the solution, but thank you so much for everything you do for the community <3

3 Likes