Drivers

Nvidia Driver on Fedora

NVIDIA Fedora Driver Guide

A little guide to help you install & manage the NVIDIA GPU driver on your Fedora system(s)

I am personally a Fedora 40 user at the moment, so this is mostly what this guide applies to (though I believe it should work alright on newer releases, and also on older releases which are not old very old [something like Fedora 38+])

❗ Kindly note

that this guide explicates the procedure of installing & uninstalling the driver through the official Nvidia driver installer downloaded from nvidia.com.

If you would like to install the driver using the RPMFusion repository instead, please refer to https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA

Index of content

⚠️ Warning

Please follow & read every part of this guide with fine care to avoid the occurrence of any problems.

Also do not worry if the system looks stuck during any rebooting step. It actually is not stuck! Kindly allow up to 2 minutes for the rebooting to complete.

Driver installation

  1. Ensure that you have uninstalled any previously installed NVIDIA drivers:
    • to uninstall any Nvidia drivers installed from the RPMFusion repository: 
      sudo dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia\*
reboot
    • to uninstall any Nvidia drivers installed using this guide: Driver uninstallation
  2. Upgrade the system packages and install the required dependencies:
sudo dnf upgrade
sudo dnf install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc make dkms acpid libglvnd-glx libglvnd-opengl libglvnd-devel pkgconfig

  1. Navigate to https://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en-us and download the proper driver for your GPU and Linux architecture. The website should give you a file that ends with the .run file extension.

  2. Switch to the terminal view of your system by pressing Alt + Ctrl + F3 (if this does not switch from the GUI mode to the terminal mode for you, try Alt + Ctrl + F1 or Alt + Ctrl + F2 instead for a different tty)

NOTE: Something that freaked me out on the Fedora terminal tty is that using the backspace key when there's nothing to erase produces a loud beep sound. You may need to pay attention to this 🫣

  1. Stop the GDM service:
sudo systemctl stop gdm

or if you are using the Fedora KDE spin, stop the SDDM service:

sudo systemctl stop sddm

Kindly note that it is important to stop the display manager (GDM/SDDM) service throughout the driver installation/uninstallation process as it may cause trouble otherwise.

  1. Change to the path of the directory that includes the downloaded .run file using cd

  2. Run the installer:

chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-555.42.02.run
sudo sh ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-555.42.02.run

(make sure to replace the file name with the actual one that you got from the Nvidia website)

  1. The installer will guide you through everything. Please read everything with care and answer the prompts depending on the proper situation to avoid any problems.

NOTE: If the installer asks you to disable Nouveau, allow the installer to disable it for you. You may need to abort the installer after this, then run sudo dracut --regenerate-all --force && reboot, then start again from step 4 once the system has completed rebooting.

  1. Once the installer has completed installing the driver, run sudo dracut --regenerate-all --force to update the initramfs.
  2. Edit /etc/default/grub using sudo nano /etc/default/grub
  3. Add nvidia-drm.modeset=1 and nvidia-drm.fbdev=1 inside your GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX (i.e. GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nvidia-drm.modeset=1 nvidia-drm.fbdev=1")
  4. Run sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.cfg
  5. Reboot the system
  6. Your newly installed driver should be up and running once the system boots up (you may run nvidia-smi to confirm so).
  7. In order to enable video acceleration support, you need to install these packages: sudo dnf install nvidia-vaapi-driver libva-utils vdpauinfo (make sure to reboot the system after installing these packages)

Driver uninstallation

  1. To ensure that we can boot into the system graphically through the Nouveau driver after uninstalling the Nvidia driver, remove any Nouveau-blacklist entries that might have been created by the installer previously:
sudo rm -rf /lib/modprobe.d/nvidia-installer-*
sudo rm -rf /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-installer-*
sudo rm -rf /usr/lib/modprobe.d/nvidia-installer-*
  1. Remove any entries related to the NVIDIA driver (nvidia-drm.modeset, nvidia-drm.fbdev, etc) from your /etc/default/grub file. (this is important).
  2. Rebuild the GRUB configuration using sudo grub2-mkconfig -o /etc/grub2.cfg
  3. Uninstall any installed NVIDIA video acceleration packages:
sudo dnf remove nvidia-vaapi-driver libva-utils vdpauinfo
  1. Run the uninstaller:
sudo nvidia-installer --uninstall
  1. Run the below commands to restore everything to how it was before the installation of the driver:
sudo rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/libGL.so.* /usr/lib{,64}/libEGL.so.*
sudo rm -f /usr/lib{,64}/xorg/modules/extensions/libglx.so
sudo dnf reinstall xorg-x11-server-Xorg mesa-libGL mesa-libEGL libglvnd\*
  1. Rebuild the system initramfs:
sudo dracut --regenerate-all --force
  1. Reboot the system once the uninstalling process has finished.

Issues faced after installing the NVIDIA drivers, and how to solve them

Getting a black screen on video players (VLC, etc)

This may happen because most of the video/media players require openh264 & a few other codecs which are not shipped by default with Fedora due to licensing reasons.

To solve this:

sudo dnf config-manager --enable fedora-cisco-openh264 -y
sudo dnf install openh264 mozilla-openh264 libavcodec-freeworld ffmpeg mpv vlc gstreamer1-plugins-bad-freeworld gstreamer1-plugins-ugly

You may need to have the RPMFusion free and nonfree repos enabled for some of the above packages.

See https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/cant-play-videos-in-firefox/79645/25 and https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/codecs-missing-failing-to-play-h-264/104643/2 for more information on this matter.

(on GNOME) Wayland is not shown as an option on the login screen (or the cog icon of the login screen doesn't show at all)

  1. Edit the /etc/gdm/custom.conf file using sudo nano /etc/gdm/custom.conf
  2. Ensure that WaylandEnable=true is set in that file and make sure that it's uncommented (does not start with a #)
  3. Run sudo ln -s /dev/null /etc/udev/rules.d/61-gdm.rules
  4. Reboot the system

The above doesn't apply to a Fedora KDE spin installation since it enforces the use of Wayland and does not have X11 anyway.

The experience on Wayland is not the smoothest (fix Wayland issues)

This may happen for a lot of reasons. For a while now, NVIDIA has been known to have issues with the Wayland windowing system. However, NVIDIA has been working on making this better. And this has actually already gotten much better starting from the NVIDIA driver 555.42.02 which added explicit sync support.

So first of all, make sure to have:

then continue reading below to make the experience even smoother: