Upgrade to 19.09 and nvidia driver failed

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1

Hi, everyone! A newbie question -

I used to have 19.03 on one of my workstations. It has an old Nvidia Geforce GTX 670 card. Today after I upgrade it to 19.09, it fails to start the display manager. My debugging so far:

  1. It is still working if I boot from an older generation with
    • NixOS 19.03
    • Kernel 4.19.69
    • Nvidia driver 418
  2. It failed to start the display manager from my latest generation
    • NixOS 19.09
    • Kernel 4.19.79
    • Nvidia driver 435
  3. However, if I disable the nvidia driver in the new generation, I can start display manager normally, although the graphics become really laggy.
  4. I tried to downgrade to NixOS 19.03, but cannot get it to kernel 4.19.69 any more in the new generation. I can confirm that the new kernel 4.19.79 and nvidia driver does not work together on my workstation for some reason.
  5. The last generation that works for me is generation 27, so I removed all the newer generations. This works but whenever I type nixos-rebuild switch, a new generation with kernel 4.19.79 will be produced .

My questions is then:

  1. What should I do to resolve this problem? Sorry that I do not have much experience debugging nvidia issues.
  2. If I am willing to live with the old generation, how can I get kernel 4.19.69 back and maybe get rid of all the new generations, pretending the upgrade never happened?

Thanks a lot for your time!

1 Like
2

Did some further digging and and another idea is that maybe this is not from the upgraded kernel, but because of the upgrade of some other packages (e.g. xorg). I am not sure how to get any useful logs though, any suggestions?

3

Not sure if it is still relevant for others.
I got this issue as soon as I start using NixOS, and it’s still relevant for me.
The Linux kernel version was pinned to 4.x as a workaround of a wifi-driver problem I had encountered.

nix-info result:

  • system: "x86_64-linux"
  • host os: Linux 4.19.136, NixOS, 20.09.20200805.8e2b14a (Nightingale)
  • multi-user?: yes
  • sandbox: yes
  • version: nix-env (Nix) 2.4pre20210308_1c0e3e4
  • channels(shamrock): "home-manager"
  • nixpkgs: /nix/var/nix/profiles/per-user/root/channels/nixos