fedora-27-nvidia-pascal.md

fedora-27-nvidia-pascal

My quick guide for installing Fedora 27 on PC with Nvidia 1080 (pascal architecture). As the time of writing the nouveau drivers do not work (reliably) with these new nvidia cards so we have to rely on proprietary drivers.

Originally I had issues getting live cd installation to work with Fedora 24 (even though disabling graphics etc.) so I decided to go to Fedora 25 straight away (although not yet released at the time of writing)

1. Install Fedora 25 using live cd. If necessary use the compatibility graphics mode to get the setup running
2. Boot to the system, you can use the virtual terminal if the UI has issues (this was the case for me)
3. Install negativo17 repos for nvidia driver dnf config-manager --add-repo=http://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-nvidia.repo
4. Install rpmfusion free repos dnf install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm
5. Install nvidia driver per the instructions of negativo17 site: dnf -y install nvidia-driver kernel-devel akmod-nvidia
6. Ensure you have same version of kernel and kernel-devel: rpm -qa|grep 'kernel-\([4]\|devel\)'. If not, try dnf distro-sync and reinstall/remove kernel and kernel-dev as approriate.
7. Disable Wayland by setting WaylandEnable=false in /etc/gdm/custom.conf since the nvidia drivers do not yet support it

Other tips

Verify nvidia driver is used

NVIDIA driver not used, nouveau used:

$ lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] [10de:1b80] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:36fe]
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau

NVIDIA driver used:

$ lspci -nnk | grep -iA2 vga
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] [10de:1b80] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd Device [1458:36fe]
	Kernel driver in use: nvidia

Verify kernel module status

$ sudo akmods                                                            ⏎
[sudo] password for USER: 
Checking kmods exist for 4.13.13-300.fc27.x86_64           [  OK  ]
Ignoring nvidia-kmod as it failed earlier                  [WARNING]

Hint: Some kmods were ignored or failed to build or install.
You can try to rebuild and install them by by calling
'/usr/sbin/akmods --force' as root.

$ sudo akmods --force  # regenerate akmods
Checking kmods exist for 4.13.13-300.fc27.x86_64           [  OK  ]
Building and installing nvidia-kmod                        [  OK  ]

$ sudo akmods
Checking kmods exist for 4.13.13-300.fc27.x86_64           [  OK  ]

Regenerate akmods

akmods --force

Make sure correct kernel sources are available in /usr/src/kernels (note 2017/11: seems that this was some glitch...)

Reinstall drivers

Reinstall akmod-nvidia and nvidia-driver

Downgrade kernel

Select another kernel in GRUB menu. If still not working (Gnome's "Something went wrong"), re-install drivers and regenerate akmods, and reboot.

Other notes

• I've had issues with 4.8.7-300 kernel but 4.8.6-300 kernel is working fine.
• 2017/03: Works with nvidia-driver-378.13-4 and 4.9.14-200 kernel (at least without Xorg, haven't even tried with wayland)
• 2017/06: Works with nvidia-driver-381.22-6.fc25.x86_64 and 4.11.3-202 kernel (at least without Xorg, haven't even tried with wayland)
• 2017/11 Works with 4.13.13-300.fc27.x86_64 and nvidia-driver-387.22-2.fc27.x86_64