NVIDIA kernel driver not installed during 2026-08-06 Stable Update

Support System Updates
1

This is the first time I have experienced the NVIDIA driver not being installed automatically during a system upgrade.

I had to install linux618-nvidia manually after this upgrade.
This was disappointing because the system became unusable with the NVIDIA driver after rebooting.

nvidia-smi
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver.
Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

sudo modprobe nvidia
modprobe: FATAL: Module nvidia not found in directory /lib/modules/6.18.42-1-MANJARO

I fixed the problem by installing the kernel-specific NVIDIA package manually:

sudo pacman -S linux618-nvidia

Then I loaded the NVIDIA DRM modules:

sudo modprobe nvidia_drm
sudo modprobe nvidia_modeset

After that:

lsmod | grep '^nvidia'

nvidia_drm       151552      0
nvidia_modeset  1818624      1 nvidia_drm
nvidia_uvm      2363392      0
nvidia        118972416      3 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_drm,nvidia_modeset

nvidia-smi also works again.

It seems to me that, on systems already using the NVIDIA driver, linux618-nvidia should be installed automatically when Linux 6.18 is installed during the system upgrade.

2

This is not a system update, if you change kernels to another major version.

How did you install it by the way?
Pacman is certainly not supposed to do that (would have been nice).
No idea for mhwd. The last time i installed a kernel with mhwd it also installed the headers, which i honestly did not expect. No idea if such auto detection works for nvidia, vbox and whatever else kernel related is there.

3

It is unclear how you had this situation.

The package manager is not an AI and it will not - on it’s own - pull packages simply because it thinks you may like it.

4

I upgrade like follows, and it has worked on May’s upgrade.
Why nvidia-divers is not installed on this upgrade?

sudo pacman -Syyuu
5

Because it wasn’t installed before manually, probably. :man_shrugging:This command only updates but does not install new things (with a couple of exceptions that confirm the rule).
Pacman cannot know you have nvidia card.

6

Don’t do that. Only use -Syu unless there is a good reason to do otherwise. Read the manual. :backhand_index_pointing_down:

man pacman

In order to switch to a different kernel if you have any proprietary drivers, you have to use mhwd-kernel, not pacman — unless you know what you’re doing.

7

Thank you for your advice.

However, in this case I could not upgrade the kernel separately.

When I tried to install Linux 6.18 with mhwd-kernel, Manjaro required a full system upgrade at the same time. So the kernel upgrade and the system upgrade were effectively tied together, because wine requires ntsync-autoload and NTSYNC-MODULE on this upgrade. That seems to be different from before.

My concern is that after this upgrade, the system booted with Linux 6.18, but the matching linux618-nvidia package had not been installed. As a result, the NVIDIA kernel module was missing and the graphical environment could not start.

For users with NVIDIA GPUs, the matching NVIDIA kernel module is required when a new kernel is installed.

It might be worth considering a way to upgrade or switch the kernel separately from the full system upgrade in cases like this.

8

I’ve moved your post and replies to a dedicated Topic to allow for more in-depth discussion. :wink:

10

pamac would have installed the extra modules automatically. pacman doesn’t has this feature …