<SOLVED> Mint 19 thinks I am using a manually installed driver

[byteme2]

Hi everyone,

Recently I had an issue where my boot time was taking over 2 minutes. I solved this problem and it boots quickly now, but I instead have the issue that my driver manager believes I have a manually installed driver in use. This isn't a terribly pressing problem as I don't have any current graphics issues, but I would like to solve it for two reasons: 1. I don't want any issues to arise in the future, and 2. I am fairly certain it is constantly running the same set of commands in the background. After I got my boot time down I used dmesg to check and make sure everything was working well, and the output contains a continually updating string of code that looks like this:

Code: Select all

[  995.492501] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
[  995.492747] nvidia-modeset: Freed GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
[  997.616810] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
[  997.617052] nvidia-modeset: Freed GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
[  999.761940] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
[  999.762182] nvidia-modeset: Freed GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
[ 1001.889958] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
[ 1001.890255] nvidia-modeset: Freed GPU:0 (GPU-6832da0f-a1fd-2ed0-a0d2-ce324326b4de) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0

This constantly is running in the background, I don't know if I would have any battery or CPU issues with it. Regardless, any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

*Side note: during the boot issue I had two issues causing the long boot time. One was that when I used cat /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume I discovered a process where resume was set to some UUID. I used sudo nano -Bw /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume to set it to RESUME=none. I don't know if this is relevant, and I forgot to take a picture of which UUID was involved.

[roblm]

my driver manager believes I have a manually installed driver in use.

Prior to Mint 19, that message was only seen when a driver was downloaded and installed from Nvidia’s website. However, I have now seen that message myself and in one other topic for Mint 19 after installing the Nvidia driver in Driver Manager and then removing the driver. It appears to be a bug. Usually a file named nvidia-graphics-drivers.conf is created in /etc/modprobe.d after a driver is installed. If the driver is uninstalled, then that file is supposed to be removed automatically. I found that the file wasn’t removed. After removing it, the message disappeared.

In regard to the repeating messages in dmesg, these topics in the Nvidia Linux Graphics forum discuss that, but no good solution is found.
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi ... cated-gpu/
https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi ... ed-gpu-0-/

It appears to happen with the nvidia-390 driver, so installing an older driver version may help, like the nvidia-384. Aaron Plattner, one of the moderators of that forum, is one of the most knowledgeable people on Linux Nvidia graphics. He doesn’t seem to be too concerned that it indicates a serious problem, and it will probably be corrected in a newer driver release.

when I used cat /etc/initramfs-tools/conf.d/resume I discovered a process where resume was set to some UUID.

That UUID is for the swap partition. You can open /etc/fstab and compare the UUIDs.

[byteme2]

Thanks, glad to hear that there isn't any serious problem. I was worried I may have broken something, but it sounds like everything is good. Thanks again for your help, I will just wait for a newer driver release then!