nVidia Graphics Question / inxi -zv8 Results

Support Graphics & Display
1

Fairly new to Manjaro (less than 1 month?) and so far absolutely blown away with performance and experience. Tried at least 10 other distros, but none of them would allow my MSI GT72 6QD laptop to suspend/wake properly when I closed/opened the laptop lid. Almost gave up on Linux on this machine but decided to try Manjaro.

Worked immediately right after install and so far experience has been stunningly excellent. As I learn more about troubleshooting, I saw this when I ran “inxi -zv8” to get some details about my hardware/drivers/setup…

Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GM204M [GeForce GTX 970M] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: nvidia v: 550.107.02 alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm non-free: 545.xx+
    status: current (as of 2024-06; EOL~2026-12-xx) arch: Maxwell code: GMxxx
    process: TSMC 28nm built: 2014-2019 pcie: gen: 3 speed: 8 GT/s lanes: 16
    ports: active: none off: eDP-1 empty: DP-1,DP-2,HDMI-A-1 bus-ID: 01:00.0
    chip-ID: 10de:1618 class-ID: 0300
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.13 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.2
    compositor: kwin_x11 driver: X: *loaded: N/A failed: nvidia*
    gpu: nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch display-ID: :0 screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 128 s-size: 381x211mm (15.00x8.31")
    s-diag: 436mm (17.15")
  Monitor-1: DP-0 res: 1920x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 128
    size: 382x215mm (15.04x8.46") diag: 438mm (17.26") modes: N/A
  API: EGL v: 1.5 hw: drv: nvidia platforms: device: 0 drv: nvidia device: 2
    drv: swrast surfaceless: drv: nvidia x11: drv: nvidia
    inactive: gbm,wayland,device-1
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 550.107.02
    glx-v: 1.4 direct-render: yes renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M/PCIe/SSE2
    memory: 2.93 GiB
  API: Vulkan v: 1.3.279 layers: 5 device: 0 type: discrete-gpu
    name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M driver: nvidia v: 550.107.02
    device-ID: 10de:1618 surfaces: xcb,xlib

In the “display” area I noticed loaded = N/A and failed = nvidia.

Neither of these sounded good, yet everything on the system seems to be working great (Steam games, FreeCAD and many other advanced apps). I’ve literally had nothing but joy on this system. Just wondered if this is something that needs to be remedied. Thank you very much for a stellar system experience.

2

As an update, today I tried moving back to kernel 6.6.46-1-MANJARO and I have what looks like better results with inxi -zv8 as follows…

Graphics:
  Device-1: NVIDIA GM204M [GeForce GTX 970M] vendor: Micro-Star MSI
    driver: nvidia v: 550.107.02 alternate: nouveau,nvidia_drm non-free: 545.xx+
    status: current (as of 2024-06; EOL~2026-12-xx) arch: Maxwell code: GMxxx
    process: TSMC 28nm built: 2014-2019 pcie: gen: 3 speed: 8 GT/s lanes: 16
    bus-ID: 01:00.0 chip-ID: 10de:1618 class-ID: 0300
  Display: x11 server: X.Org v: 21.1.13 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.2
    compositor: kwin_x11 driver: X: loaded: nvidia gpu: nvidia display-ID: :0
    screens: 1
  Screen-1: 0 s-res: 1920x1080 s-dpi: 128 s-size: 381x211mm (15.00x8.31")
    s-diag: 436mm (17.15")
  Monitor-1: Unknown-1 mapped: DP-0 res: 1920x1080 hz: 60 dpi: 128
    size: 382x215mm (15.04x8.46") modes: 1920x1080
  API: EGL v: 1.5 hw: drv: nvidia platforms: device: 0 drv: nvidia device: 2
    drv: swrast gbm: drv: kms_swrast surfaceless: drv: nvidia x11: drv: nvidia
    inactive: wayland,device-1
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 550.107.02
    glx-v: 1.4 direct-render: yes renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M/PCIe/SSE2
    memory: 2.93 GiB
  API: Vulkan v: 1.3.279 layers: 5 device: 0 type: discrete-gpu
    name: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 970M driver: nvidia v: 550.107.02
    device-ID: 10de:1618 surfaces: xcb,xlib

I also tried newer kernel 6.10 but had the same errors as 6.9

I think I have determined that 6.6.46-1-MANJARO should be my daily driver? I also noticed with 6.6 that I could start the Plasma GUI session with Wayland (instead of X11) and it worked much better albeit CPU load at idle was around 5% whereas with X11 it is around 1%.

Just some oddities I noticed. If anyone has any comments if I should stick with 6.6 over 6.9 or 6.10, I would gladly love to hear some thoughts. If there are things I could do to understand the issue why 6.9 and 6.10 seem to have errors in the Graphics/Display section under inxi, I will continue to read forums, wiki’s, etc and try to understand more how to get this hardware configured.

Thank you in advance.

3

Manjaro uses mhwd (or Manjaro Settings Manager GUI) to handle drivers.
So what does it report?

mhwd -li -l

PS.

When sharing an inxi … it makes sense to share all of it. Not just what you think is relevant.
Note: The z in the following command automatically hides personal information like MAC.

inxi -Farz
4

Here is what the mhwd -li -l command returned

mhwd -li -l                                                                                                     
> Installed PCI configs:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          video-nvidia            2024.05.03               false            PCI


Warning: No installed USB configs!
> 0000:01:00.0 (0300:10de:1618) Display controller nVidia Corporation:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
                  NAME               VERSION          FREEDRIVER           TYPE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
          video-nvidia            2024.05.03               false            PCI
    video-nvidia-470xx            2023.03.23               false            PCI
    video-nvidia-390xx            2023.03.23               false            PCI
           video-linux            2024.05.06                true            PCI
     video-modesetting            2020.01.13                true            PCI
            video-vesa            2017.03.12                true            PCI

My issue has been with 6.9, the “loaded” portion of the display driver says N/A, whereas with 6.6 “loaded” says “nvidia” now, which makes much more sense. Manjaro is still the only distro on this laptop where I can close/open the lid and have suspend/resume work properly right off of the install.

I think ultimately I need to learn much more about installing and testing the video drivers. It would appear they are very finicky and one version may not pair properly with different versions of the kernel.

Lots to learn.

Oh yeah, and thank you for the inxi tip.

5

That seems fine and what you want.
The latest nvidia driver.

Then there is something wrong, as for example, linux610-nvidia exists.

Well … maybe … did you do something like try to manually download the nvidia driver?

And/or how have you been attempting to add new kernels?

I suppose we can query your installed packages as a minor first check…

pacman -Qqs nvidia
6

pacman -Qqs nvidia

returned the following…

cuda
egl-wayland
lib32-libvdpau
lib32-nvidia-utils
libvdpau
libxnvctrl
linux66-nvidia
linux69-nvidia
mhwd-nvidia
mhwd-nvidia-390xx
mhwd-nvidia-470xx
nvidia-settings
nvidia-utils
opencl-nvidia

The video-nvidia drivers were installed on my system when I installed Manjaro from the USB stick with the ISO on it (24.0.5). When I learned about the inxi command and the -zv8 options and ran it on my machine I saw some things that looked odd in the Display/Loaded area and someone else on another forum said it did not look right to them.

My install came with kernel 6.9. I tried 6.10 as it was newer but had the same issue. I read the 6.6 was supposedly a more stable LTS kernel so I tried it and it sure seems to work. I don’t see anything peculiar in the inxi -zv8 with the kernel 6.6 / nVidia 550 combo.

7

Output looks normal - if you only have kernels 6.6 and 6.9.
(if you have kernel 6.10 installed currently … then the associated nvidia package is missing)

PS.
kernel 6.9 is EOL. It technically still exists in the Stable and Testing repos, but probably not for much longer. You may wish to excise it at some point soon - especially if you end up having more than one working kernel.

8

I did have 6.10 on my machine, but I ended up removing it. I am planning on excising 6.9 and just staying with 6.6

Do you see any issues with that?

Thank you for all your help/guidance. I am still absolutely stoked about Manjaro and cannot believe how enjoyable it is to use.

9

Nothing wrong with that really. 6.6 is an LTS and will be supported until about 2027. Or so kernel.org projects currently anyways. I do generally suggest folks keep more than one kernel. Something like 1 known good one and then the shiny new one they are testing out, etc.
(which sounds roughly like what you are doing - just with poor results for all newer kernels)

To leave off I will include some mirror ranking, sync, update, and driver reinstall just for completeness;

sudo pacman-mirrors --continent
sudo pacman -Syu
sudo mhwd -f -i pci video-nvidia

To include an mhwd-kernel example of installation as well;

sudo mhwd-kernel -i linux610

Also here is rebuilding initram and updating grub

sudo mkinitcpio -P
sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Which reminds me … you probably would want to have KMS set and so forth.
Especially for nvidia+wayland.
Here is a guide on that
https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_mode_setting#Early_KMS_start

(if you do end up using such options you will want to run mkinitcpio/grub-mkconfig afterwards as above)

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