Nvidia drivers on Z Book

[skreaminskull]

Hello all,

I'm experiencing a bit of a strange problem setting up an HP Z Book workstation, specifically getting the proprietary Nvidia drivers installed. With the default Nouveau driver, I was unable to change the resolution to a value greater than 1024x768 which is far below the native 1920x1080. The results of the lpsci command only lists the GK107GLM [Quadro K1100M] so it doesn't appear that I would have to contend with bumblebee for the optimus set up.

After installing the kmod-nvidia and nvidia-x11-drv drivers from elrepo, when I reboot the machine I only get as far as a tpm_tis error and it hangs from that point on...I'm not even making it to the point of providing the password for the LUKS encryption. This is running kernel 3.10.0-123.4.2.

This forces me to reboot and select rescue from grub. From here I'm able to provide the LUKS password and continue booting. I see the NVidia splash screen and once logged in, my resolution is 1920 x 1080 and I can launch the NVIDIA X Server Settings app. One thing that has me puzzled is that running lsmod and grepping for "nouveau" I can see nouveau is still present, but I can also get results grepping for nVidia as well. In rescue, its running kernel 3.10.0-123.

So first question is just for my own curiosity, but how is it booting up with this image with both nouveau and nvidia? I was under the impression that the elrepo drivers took care of disabling nouveau to avoid running dracut. Second question is if there is anything else I can try to get this working with the current kernel? I'm kind of at a loss on how to troubleshoot further because I am not making it far enough in the boot process to get additional information to troubleshoot.

Thanks in advance for your time.

[skreaminskull]

OK, finally was able to figure out what was going on with this. The issue turned out to be that the proprietary Nvidia drivers do not support KMS, which Plymouth in RHEL 7 now makes use of. Wanted to post what I did to fix here in case anyone else runs into the same issue.

I went into /etc/grub2.cfg and removed "rhgb" option from the Grub kernel line. This will boot up in text mode so you see everything that is loading, but it will boot to Gnome now and I can log in with the native 1920 x 1080 resolution. The only reason I was able to get it to boot normally under the rescue entry with the proprietary Nvidia driver installed was because this was the only entry in Grub where nouveau wasn't specifically blacklisted. My guess is that it was loading nouveau at first allowing it to continue with Plymouth's dependency on KMS and then switched over to Nvidia driver for X.

But all is working now and moving forward with setting the Z Book up.

Thanks!

[toracat]

Thank you for reporting back with the solution. Just for reference, the issue has been discussed in this ELRepo's bug report.

[skreaminskull]

Thanks for the link to the bug report in ELRepo, toracat!