Do I need Nvidia drivers with only an AMD APU?

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1

I have a laptop with a Ryzen 7 3700U and no dedicated GPU. I was noticing today that most of my recent updates were for Nvidia drivers. Do I need to have these installed? Will anything break if I remove them?

Normally, I’d just try it and see what happens, but last time I messed with graphics drivers I totally broke Manjaro. The only way I recovered it was by chrooting using a live USB. Ideally, I don’t want to go through that again :upside_down_face:

2

Are you sure they were drivers and not mhwd modules?

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3

Hi @Gquirt,

You can check which drivers are installed with mhwd. Just run:

mhwd --listinstalled

And you should be able to remove any for Nvidia with:

mhwd --remove pci <gpu_driver_name>

Where <gpu_driver_name> is the name of the driver you wish to remove, identified with the output of the previous command.

Since you’ve got only AMD, it should be safe removing any Nvidia drivers.

Hope this helps!

4

Thanks for the help!

There’s no Nvidia drivers listed with the mhwd command, but I do see some when using Pamac.

Output of mhwd --listinstalled:

> Installed PCI configs:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
           video-linux            2018.05.04                true            PCI


Warning: No installed USB configs!

Output of pacman -Qs nvidia:

local/cuda 11.7.1-3
    NVIDIA's GPU programming toolkit
local/egl-wayland 2:1.1.11-2
    EGLStream-based Wayland external platform
local/lib32-libvdpau 1.5-1
    Nvidia VDPAU library
local/libvdpau 1.5-1
    Nvidia VDPAU library
local/libxnvctrl 520.56.06-1
    NVIDIA NV-CONTROL X extension
local/mhwd-nvidia 520.56.06-2
    MHWD module-ids for nvidia 520.56.06
local/mhwd-nvidia-390xx 390.154-2
    MHWD module-ids for nvidia 390.154
local/mhwd-nvidia-470xx 470.141.03-3
    MHWD module-ids for nvidia 470.141.03
local/nvidia-utils 520.56.06-2
    NVIDIA drivers utilities
local/opencl-nvidia 520.56.06-2
    OpenCL implemention for NVIDIA
local/xf86-video-nouveau 1.0.17-2 (xorg-drivers)
    Open Source 3D acceleration driver for nVidia cards

Can I safely remove these packages as well? Looking just from this list, local/egl-wayland seems to be the only one I would keep.

Moderator edit: In the future, please use proper formatting: [HowTo] Post command output and file content as formatted text

5

Hi, I had the very same question on the thread mentionned above by @NGr

I successfully removed some nVidia packages that came as dependency of… a not so usefull package that I removed.

But mhwd packages are still in.

@Mirdarthos : what is really removable next ?

[me@ordi1 ~]$ mhwd --listinstalled
> Installed PCI configs:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
           video-linux            2018.05.04                true            PCI


Warning: No installed USB configs!
[me@ordi1 ~]$ pacman -Q | grep "nvidia"
mhwd-nvidia 520.56.06-2
mhwd-nvidia-390xx 390.154-2
mhwd-nvidia-470xx 470.141.03-3
[me@ordi1 ~]$
6

All the mhwd-nvidia packages are required by mhwd-db (Manjaro Linux Hardware Detection Database), you really need not concern yourself with them as they are not drivers.

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