NVidia driver fails to initialize properly in Mint, about one in three times

[Diskdoc]

Uh, actually nvidiafb WASN'T disabled after all, because I realized that was only done in the newest kernel and didn't carry on to 4.15 when I installed it. So my recent testing has been done with 4.15+nvidiafb+fbdev!

[roblm]

Are both problems solved? You didn’t say if the desktop is in fallback mode with the 4.15 kernel.

[Diskdoc]

Yes, it seems that both problems (autologin and fallback) are solved running 4.15 with fbdev and nvidiafb drivers installed!

Is there a next step? Should I try other kernels? Do we have enough information to do a bug report?

[roblm]

The older 4.15 kernel is more compatible with your older video card. There’s no need to file a bug report.

[Diskdoc]

Ok! Hopefully someone else with the same problem will find this thread here along with our solution. Thanks a lot for your time and patience in guiding me!

[Diskdoc]

Meh! The fallback-problem happened with the 4.15 now too, twice! Seems a bit more likely to happen from a cold boot but I could be imagining it. Had hwe-fb and nvidiafb installed.

[roblm]

You can try the same steps previously used with the 5.3 kernel.

You can try reverting back to the previous X.Org X display server, version 1.19:
apt install xserver-xorg xserver-xorg-video-all xserver-xorg-input-all

To revert back to version 1.20:
apt install xserver-xorg-hwe-18.04 xserver-xorg-input-all-hwe-18.04 xserver-xorg-video-all-hwe-18.04

You can install Mint 18. Then the nvidia-304 driver can be tested.

I don’t have any other suggestion.

[Diskdoc]

I added the graphics PPA and was able to try out NVidia driver 340.108 - same result. Downgrading X.org didn't work for some reason so I haven't gone down the path of 1.19 yet.

I did however find a short but interesting thread with a suggestion that I'm trying to implement:

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topi ... -testing-/

I added nvidia, drm and nvidia_uva to /etc/modules and did update-initramfs -u. Will use that for a while and see how it goes.

[Diskdoc]

Have booted the 5.30 kernel at least a dozen times now without any sign of problems. Hopefully problem solved!

[gittiest personITW]

Ok! Hopefully someone else with the same problem will find this thread here along with our solution. Thanks a lot for your time and patience in guiding me!

Yes, very handy.
A friend of mine's computer has exactly the same problem with the C79.
Will get them to try 5.3 kernel.
Cheers.

[Diskdoc]

I'm very happy you found this thread and that it may help you! What kernel you use doesn't seem to matter that much - the important thing is editing /etc/modules and remaking initramfs according to the previous instructions.

[karlchen]

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bert-boer01's post split off. New thread is there: viewtopic.php?f=59&t=352991.
Reason: Different Mint versions: 19.3 vs. 20.2 (based on Ubuntu 18.04 vs Ubuntu 20.04)
</mod>