Fedora 26 with Nvidia proprietary drivers and Wayland running (Part 2)

First of all let’s use a repository which of which the user has some experience with Nvidia Cards on Fedora in general.

http://negativo17.org/nvidia-driver/

Add his repository by executing following command as super user:

dnf config-manager --add-repo=http://negativo17.org/repos/fedora-nvidia.repo

Open the Software and choose Nvidia drivers. You might have to reload meta-data.

I clicked on „install“ and the driver got magically installed. When it was finished, the GUI started to glitch very badly. Now I had no chance but to coldboot (Reset button). This time Gnome-Shell started with the otehr Nvidia drivers correctly. The bad news are, X returned back to its place. We are not going to give up aren’t we?

For some odd reason, nouveau was disabled, I think the installation did that or the system know that we don’t want to use that driver when a proprietary driver is installed. Not sure…

Let’s try to get Wayland using.

Become super user and create a file where more modules of nvidia are loaded at boot time:

sudo gedit /etc/dracut.conf.d/nvidia.conf

Here we add these two lines:

add_drivers+="nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm"
install_items+="/etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf"

Now create a modprobe config file:

sudo gedit /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf

And add this line to the empty file:

options nvidia_drm modeset=1

Also we should not omit drm drivers:

gedit /usr/lib/dracut.conf.d/99-nvidia-dracut.conf

Comment the section where it tries to omit the drm module.

Now let dracut prepare the boot options for the kernel appriopiately:

dracut --regenerate-all --force

I found out that I had an unsupported Kernel installed. Dracut would complain. If you are using a newer kernel you can remove older ones.

Now let the system remove all the older kernels:

package-cleanup --oldkernels --count=1

And rerun dracut. You should not get any errors. That is important, otherwise Wayland won’t work on the system:

dracut --regenerate-all --force

Now reboot your system normally and let’s see how well it runs…

Troubleshoot

Well, on my system runs but very slow. I had to choose Gnome-Shell with X to have my smooth experience back.

To make this sluggish behavior go away open the file /etc/gdm/custom.conf and disable wayland:

[daemon]
# Uncoment the line below to force the login screen to use Xorg
WaylandEnable=false

Now I have X running everywhere. I will investigate why Wayland is that slow here. You might have different experience. Good Luck!

If some update happen to fix your problem, just again by re-enabling Wayland from /etc/gdm/custom.conf file. Everything else is setup so far.

Unfortunately on Fedora 26 it did not help in my case. Hope the update will fix it. I’ll believe that Wayland with Nvidia propietary will work and keep you and the developers informed.

Conclusion

What can I say, Fedora distros have become very solid in the last years. Besides the strange installation everything runs just fine. Still I would wait for official release. It is planned by end of June.

What do you think? Do you have the same issue as me? Or is there a better idea in how to tackle this small left issue. Let me know in the comments below.

Troubleshooting

I recently had problems after some updates that nouveau driver got enabled somehow. I would blacklist it. Do not try to uninstall it:gedit /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf

There should be the entry

blacklist nouveau

add that line, if it is missing and run

dracut --regenerate-all --force