Strange Crash After NVidia Driver Installation From ELRepo

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Hi,

I just had the weirdest of system crashed. Here goes.

I wanted to install a desktop step by step, as I usually do. First the base system, then the X Window System, then the WindowMaker window manager. Everything went OK, then I installed kmod-nvidia from ELRepo. Yum informed me that the driver conflicted with x11-glamor (something like that), so I removed the corresponding package.

While doing all this, the system still defaulted to boot in console mode
(meaning multi-user.target and not graphical.target). To test X, I just launched WindowMaker using startx.

Anyway, I rebooted, and then… nothing. System refused even to startup, and systemd suggested to me that I open journalctl (which taught me nothing).

Right now I’ve started a Slax LiveCD to backup all my data and reinstall the whole thing from scratch. I don’t have the slightest clue as to what could possibly have happened here. The only thing I wonder: could it be that installing the kmod-nvidia driver while booting to a default console (and not graphical) could lead to this weirdness? A previous installation on that machine went OK, but the difference was that the first time, I started with a full GNOME installation right away.

Any suggestions?

Niki

7 thoughts on - Strange Crash After NVidia Driver Installation From ELRepo

  • There are multiple nvidia drivers in Elrepo, depending on the model of video card. Install and run nvidia-detect to find out which driver you need; just installing the “kmod-nvidia” package is not guaranteed to give you a working driver.

    Steve

  • Le 03.03.2015 17:00, Steve Thompson a écrit :

    I used nvidia-detect, and installed kmod-nvidia. Even then, the previous installation ran kmod-nvidia with success on twin monitors.

    And even then, installing the wrong NVidia driver should only result in X failing to start… but not in a system that won’t even *boot*. Startup messages stopped short immediately, I’d say right after initramfs was loaded.

    On a side note: before using CentOS, I ran Slackware for a few years, so I know how to configure X and video drivers manually. I’ve never seen this sort of weird crash.

    Niki

  • This might have to do with the NVidia update, explained on the elrepo pages.

    http://elrepo.org/tiki/kmod-nvidia

    You may have an older card that will require the 340xx versions of the various NVidia tools.

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  • This doesn’t make any sense. You said ‘nothing’ but it also suggested you run journalctl? So it wasn’t nothing. What exactly did it do?
    Did it drop into the rescue shell? Did it kernel panic? Did you see some text then the screen blanked?

    Did you try older any older kernels that might have been loaded?

    One of the things that the nvidia driver adds is “nouveau.modeset=0
    rdblacklist=nouveau” to the kernel arguments. Do you see them? I
    know that we saw the kernel panic when the nouveau driver was loaded on a el6.6 system with an NVidia K620, so perhaps when you brought in X11 you also installed the nouveau drivers?

  • Le 03/03/2015 18:45, Scott Robbins a écrit :

    No, it’s a GT520 which is supposed to work with the latest driver.

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  • info@microlinux.fr wrote:

    That would be the openGL libraries. kmod-nvidia will install its own.

    I’m a tad confused: you say “nothing”, and that system refused to startup, but systemd is talking. Where is it in the bootup? What happens if you edit the grub kernel line one time, to s, so that it boots to single user mode?

    mark