I’m new to Rocky and I’m trying to understand how best to approach proprietary NVIDIA driver installation on my legacy machine (an HP Z8 G4 with a Quadro P5000 graphics card).
I tried to follow the Nvidia Drivers on Rocky Linux Common Issues and Questions document, starting with the RPMFusion driver installation section. After carefully following through with the akmod-nvidia installation, I rebooted into a less-than-satisfactory windowing environment, with the llvmpipe driver loaded and my second monitor inaccessible.
I then restarted the installation from scratch and tried again with the akmod-nvidia-470xx versions, but got the same result.
Finally I tried NVIDIA’s official repos. I installed nvidia-driver:525 and at first blush got the same result, but on rebooting with an earlier kernel the “real” NVIDIA driver loaded correctly (“NVIDIA Corporation GP104GL [Quadro P5000]”).
The (more current) kernel version that caused the llvmpipe driver to load was
5.14.0-503.15.1.el9_5.x86_64
The older kernel version that allowed the correct NVIDIA driver to load was
5.14.0-362.8.1.el9_3.x86_64
I have a somewhat stable system, but I’m not sure what will happen if I allow the system to update itself. Will newer kernel versions be incompatible with the working nvidia-driver:525? Should I be taking a different approach? Does anyone else have experience getting a Quadro P5000 working with Rocky 9.3?
Thanks, Dave Tanner