Running RL 9,4. How do I tell which versrion of the nouveau driver I have installed? inxi --graphics just says “driver: nouveau v: kernel” but not which version.
Where do you need the version?
What does modinfo tell?
Btw, you should be running 9.5 (and soon 9.6) – the 9.4 is no longer supported.
I am running 9.5, 9.4 was a typo.
modinfo nouveau shows (among all the information):
filename: /lib/modules/5.14.0-503.40.1.el9_5.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau.ko.xz
I want to make sure I am running the latest version of the driver since my laptop occasionally locks up hard and needs to be rebooted. The graphics driver is one of the prime suspects.
You are running the latest kernel currently, so as the nouveau driver is included in the kernel via the kernel-modules package. Otherwise your alternative is installing the nvidia drivers instead.
Nouveau is one of the drivers included in the kernel package(s), so one does not choose its version separately; one chooses the kernel.
Well, ELRepo does have alternative versions of drivers for some hardware (but not nouveau), so it is technically possible to have a different version of same driver. With NVidia GPU’s the usual alternative is NVidia’s driver, not another nouveau.
First, laptops tend to have up to two “GPU”: IGP in the CPU, and (optional) discrete (NVidia/AMD) GPU. The use of the two is art that I’m not familiar with.
Second, the GDM defaults to Wayland with nouveau (and mith recent NVidia drivers). That is, GDM runs with Wayland and (Gnome) DE session default uses Wayland. One can choose X11 DE session.
One can also explicitly disable Wayland and then GDM runs with X11 and offers only X11-based sessions. (See /etc/gdm/custom.conf)
I have had total Wayland DE lockups with both nouveau and NVidia’s drivers. For now, I still run X11 session.
The Rocky 10 will have only Wayland as option; no X11. That will be interesting.
It’s actually not too bad. I did have an MSI laptop that worked like this, either the base card or the NVidia 1050 2GB - obviously requires the Nvidia driver installing to be able to have the chance to switch between the two, otherwise you are stuck with just the base one. Kind of a waste for the 2GB card otherwise. So this part is actually pretty easy.
That said, other problems were caused by this, for example my wifi performance was real bad when the NVidia drivers were installed. I only found this out after completely reinstalling the laptop with Fedora instead of Linux Mint (what I had previously), and then finding all was good, until I installed the NVidia drivers here as well, and then my wifi performance dropped. And it was real bad. Who would have thought?
After this, I’m kind of against choosing these combo graphics cards, and am inclined to stick with choosing Lenovo laptops like my current T15p, or any other laptop that doesn’t have combo cards.
Maybe a bit offtopic.
That said, there is the possibility that the elrepo ML and LT kernels will have a newer nouveau driver than the base 5.x kernels in Rocky though. An easier way to get them without having to try and compile them yourself.
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I am running X11, not Wayland. Is it possible to somehow determine if the hard lockups are due to the video driver (or something else)?