How do I properly downgrade the NVIDIA graphics driver?

Support Graphics & Display
1

I’m having trouble with the most recent version of the NVIDIA driver (555.58.02) where the digital DVI outputs don’t work anymore (and hence one of the monitors in my multi-monitor setup doesn’t get a signal). This is a known issue with this version of the NVIDIA driver (search for topic 298311 in the NVIDIA developer forums - I can’t post links).

So I wanted to downgrade to the previous version, 550.90.07. But mhwd doesn’t allow you to downgrade to a granular version of a driver, only to older branches (video-nvidia-470xx and video-nvidia-390xx), and I didn’t want to do that.

I tried downgrading using manjaro-downgrade, with the following command and picking the 550.90.07 versions for these packages:

$ sudo manjaro-downgrade linux69-nvidia linux66-nvidia nvidia-utils lib32-nvidia-utils

But upon rebooting, the X server didn’t start up. Checking the logs revealed that it seemed like the NVIDIA kernel modules weren’t able to be found:

Jul 07 13:14:30 (my hostname) systemd-modules-load[261]: Failed to find module 'nvidia'
Jul 07 13:14:30 (my hostname) systemd-modules-load[261]: Failed to find module 'nvidia-drm'
Jul 07 13:14:30 (my hostname) systemd-modules-load[261]: Failed to find module 'nvidia-uvm'

I even tried the fallback initramfs for Linux 6.9, and even tried booting into the LTS kernel (Linux 6.6), but none of that worked. I ultimately had to reinstall the latest version of the NVIDIA driver using mhwd to get the X server to start again.

Did I do something wrong? What is the proper way to downgrade to the previous version of the NVIDIA driver, if any?

2

install downgrade as described in the wiki

then run

sudo manjaro-downgrade nvidia

i never downgraded nvidia but after running the downgrade i would always run

sudo mkinitcpio -P
sudo update-grub
3

Hi, @Olli. Just tried this and I’m getting 404 upon trying to

sudo manjaro-downgrade nvidia

and choosing version 550.90.07:

error: failed retrieving file 'nvidia-550.90.07-10-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst' from manjaro.tuxboy.eu : The requested URL returned error: 404
4

well in this case you can try the following
a) download the desired version direct from the nvidia-homepage
b) run the following in a terminal

chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-550.90.07.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-550.90.07.run

run

sudo mkinitcpio -P
sudo update-grub

reboot

5

Or he can pull it from any mirror on the stable branch because that is the current version
https://mirror.alpix.eu/manjaro/stable/extra/x86_64/linux66-nvidia-550.90.07-5-x86_64.pkg.tar.zst
and then install it offline with pacman -U

6

Olli’s solution actually worked, thanks! I should point out that I had to run the script in maintenance mode, since it would display a warning about the nvidia-drm modules being loaded when I ran it under the desktop session.

7

keep in mind, you’ll have to install this driver after each update, cause the update will install the newer driver or you have to blacklist the driver in the pacman-configuration.

8

Welcome to the forum! :wave:

Link for reference:

:warning: Downgrading packages is not officially supported. Doing so can and will put you in an unsupported upgrade state.

We still have the NVIDIA 550.90.07 packages in the Manjaro stable branch. You apparently are using either the testing or unstable branch. Switch back to stable for now.

:warning: Using the installer directly is not supported and will cause conflicts with the official repo packages.

I’ve unmarked the reply as the solution.