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What if my initial ramdisk image contains Nouveau?

Some distributions, particularly recent Red Hat/Fedora distributions, include Nouveau in an initial ramdisk image (henceforth referred to as "initrd" in this document, and sometimes also known as "initramfs"), so that Nouveau's kernel modeset can take place as early as possible in the boot process. This poses an additional challenge to those who wish to prevent the modeset from occurring, as the modeset will occur while the system is executing within the initrd, before the directives in /etc/modprobe.d are processed.

If you have an initrd which loads the Nouveau driver, you will additionally need to ensure that Nouveau is disabled in the initrd. If your initrd understands the rdblacklist parameter, you can add the option rdblacklist=nouveau to your kernel's boot parameters. This should be done in your bootloader's configuration file(s), so that the option gets passed to your kernel every time the system is booted. Please consult your distribution's documentation on how to configure your bootloader, as different distributions use different configuration files.

An alternative is to rebuild your initrd without Nouveau. If you choose this option instead of configuring your bootloader, please consult your distribution's documentation on how to rebuild the initrd, as different distributions have different tools for building and modifying the initrd.


How do I prevent the X server from loading Nouveau?


Blacklisting Nouveau will only prevent it from being loaded automatically at boot. If an X server is started as part of the normal boot process, and that X server uses the Nouveau X driver, then the Nouveau kernel module will still be loaded. Should this happen, you will be able to unload Nouveau with `modprobe -r nouveau` after stopping the X server, as long as you have taken care to prevent it from doing a kernel modeset; however, it is probably better to just make sure that X does not load Nouveau in the first place.

If your system is not configured to start an X server at boot, then you can simply run the NVIDIA driver installer after rebooting. Otherwise, the easiest thing to do is to edit your X server's configuration file so that your X server uses a non-modesetting driver that is compatible with your card, such as the vesa driver. You can then stop X and and install the driver as usual. Please consult your X server's documentation to determine where your X server configuration file is located.

sudo apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

sudo update-initramfs -u

sudo service mdm stop

sudo modprobe -r nouveau

Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0"

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64

So I removed the nouveau drivers from X:

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sudo apt-get --purge remove xserver-xorg-video-nouveau

Create a new initramfs boot image:

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sudo update-initramfs -u

Reboot, press Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a terminal, login and stop mdm:

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sudo service mdm stop

After this it should finally be possible to unload the kernel module:

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sudo modprobe -r nouveau

Indeed, now I could install the nvidia driver.

But that was not all, *sigh* After reboot, I only had 640x480 resolution available. I installed bumblebee as per these instructions. That took care of that. But then the next issue: only cinnamon 2D. ~/.xsession-errors showed the following error:

Xlib: extension "GLX" missing on display ":0.0"



I happened to stumble upon this article, suggesting to reinstall X:

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    sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg-core libgl1-mesa-glx:amd64 libgl1-mesa-dri:amd64

Now when I type 'glxgears' in a terminal window, the gears appear. And using optirun ('optirun glxgears'), I get ~750 fps. And the power usage of my laptop was reduced quite considerably.