[HOWTO] UEFI, nvidia - made simple(fb)

kernelOfTruth

So you want to install nvidia-drivers on an UEFI PC ?

Oftentimes when attempting to do that - one gets to one conclusion:

"One does not simply install nvidia-drivers on an UEFI system"

Yeah, well - that was at least my experience and the one of several other wanderers along the path to the promised land of "The Way It's Meant to be Played ™"

Hi guys,

when you're transitioning from a BIOS based PC to a UEFI based one,

setting up the bootloader, adding an entry to UEFI and getting it to boot up at all can be quite a chore - it took me a week to understand how all works & to collect the information of the EFI boot partition

(what a noob ! - yeah yeah :lol:

)

(see https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-992002-view-next.html)

After the dust has settled of setting up your bootloader & once you're able to boot into your new shiny installation (or if you've made a stage4 tarball of your old system and transitioned e.g. from very-old Intel to Ubercool new Intel cpu),

the main action part of the fun (emerge world) firstly begins here

So you want to install the proprietary nvidia-drivers to savor some Triple A Steam games (like Metro 2033 Redux, Metro: Last Light Redux, Bioshock Infinite, ...) and cherish the power of Linux gaming ?

This can be quite troublesome since there are several ways to do it:

- uvesafb + nvidia-drivers
- efifb + nvidia-drivers
- simplefb + nvidia-drivers
- ...

and probably several more options I haven't considered

Well, if you don't have to insist on having shiny high-res boot-up graphics right from the start - let's just settle with the KISS (keep it simple, stupid) option and settle with simplefb for now

Provided of course that you can live with the following error message:

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Thu Mar 19, 2015 11:05 pm Post subject:

Tl;dr (aka Checklist)

* Kernel configuration

Device Drivers -> Graphics support ->

poncho · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 06 Mar 2011 Posts: 92

It should be possible to enable CONFIG_DRM and skip the "X-Server configuration" part.

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Fri Mar 20, 2015 1:11 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your input poncho !

good to know that it would work with that enabled

well, your approach is close to the way Ubuntu or Debian do it (nouveau, etc. kernel modules ARE compiled - the kernel is NOT changed during installation

and allows for a greater flexibility since you only need to blacklist the kernel modules).

It comes down what the user's preferred way of doing things is.

The gentoo wiki does show this same way or the way that was pointed out to me in the past,

and I'm following that since it has worked fine so far,

also there's less confusion and more clarity (you're only going for the one approach),

later on don't need to un-blacklist the kernel modules, etc.

Silent-Hunter · Apprentice Joined: 07 Jul 2013 Posts: 166

I can't find several of these in the menuconfig. fillrect is missing for example. How do I enable these through the menu?

EDIT: I found the options. Still, following these directions precisely gives nothing after "Loading initial ramdisk ...". Was there something I missed?

kernelOfTruth · Posted: Sun Apr 26, 2015 12:16 pm Post subject:

@Silent-Hunter:

you, by chance, are running a laptop with optimus where the dedicated CPU can not be enabled and thus the other one disabled in BIOS ?

I took a look what other options might be related

and stumbled over the following:

steveL · Posted: Sun Jun 07, 2015 1:24 am Post subject:

Nice tip KoT :-) (Installation: "UEFI and nvidia")

Keep up the good work, as ever.

photonic · n00b Joined: 09 Feb 2014 Posts: 10

Very nice guide, thanks for the work.

steveL · Posted: Fri Apr 15, 2016 12:29 pm Post subject:

With regard to the error message ("NVRM: Your system is not currently configured to drive a VGA console"), blugendoo points out:
NVidia says:

VinzC · Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 3:40 pm Post subject:

Thank you very much, KernelOfTruth for this guide as I believe it contains hints as to a problem that I've just experienced.

Just some clarification though. When you say "install nvidia-drivers on an UEFI PC" what do you mean exactly? I'm asking because I do have a computer with a UEFI motherboard — an ASUS P8H67-M. I bought it a couple of years ago and never experienced a hiccup with Gentoo: proprietary nVidia drivers coexisted with uvesafb and I boot my PC with extlinux, not Grub. No problem until today, as I've just updated about 390 packages (I don't upgrade very often and only rarely get bitten but that's another story) including nvidia drivers, from 352.x to 361.y.

So basically I do have a UEFI computer but what you described didn't seem to apply to me until now. What have I missed? How are nvidia drivers related to UEFI?

Now to the issue I've just ran into.

After the upgrade I noticed switching away from X (e.g. to a text console) then back froze the computer. The only option was (still is) the magic SysRq key (sync, boot). I suppose what you described here is the reason for this lock-up?

For the record, I'm considering switching to nouveau. There have been quite a lot of changes since I last tried it. Any recommendation?
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kernelOfTruth · Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2016 10:22 pm Post subject:

VinzC · Posted: Tue Jul 26, 2016 1:01 pm Post subject:

Thanks again for these insights. As a matter of fact I now experience lockups with nouveau, too

. I can get the computer to reboot from SSH btu it's about all I can do. FTR lockups occur while browsing google maps, go the f*** figure! I'm not sure which is the most annoying so far... (ah computers :evil:

!)

So maybe I'll turn nVidia drivers in again. Which of course now means no more fancy pancy bootsplash... *sighs*

(Why does it have to be so complicated!)
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AaylaSecura · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Jun 2011 Posts: 122

Just to share my experience: I have ASUS X99, but I was booting in BIOS mode until yesterday when I decided to swicth to UEFI (all went more quickly and painfree than I thought). I found out that since recently nvidia-drivers support KMS and I was trying to get it to work but I couldn't (in BIOS mode): I kept getting black screen (tried vesafb and no fb at all) even though dmesg showed no errors and all the modules were loaded properly. When I switched to UEFI mode (converted from MBR to GPT, disabled CSM completely and built an EFI stub kernel). I was finally able to get KMS with nvidia-drivers. I read on the Arch wiki that nvidia-drivers still do not support a high resolution console using vesafb (don't know about uvesa), but they do using efifb, so I only tried efifb; and it worked (and the resolution is high) It's imperative that CONFIG_DRM is enabled and that nvidia_drm module is loaded with modeset=1. Here are the relevant options I have:

VinzC · Posted: Thu Aug 18, 2016 7:30 am Post subject:

@AaylaSecura,

Thanks a lot for your interesting post.

From your message I understand that (U)EFI boot implies no bootloader, is that correct...? That sure spares the "hassle" of selecting which boot loader to install (I prefer syslinux over Grub though) but in the meantime how are arguments supposed to be passed to the kernel then?

I guess there's always the possibility to store them in the kernel configuration but I'm curious — FTR I'm asking because I always viewed (U)EFI as evil since it takes the control away from the user and puts it into the hands of manufacturers, i.e. people we, users don't know. And who reasonably trusts someone she doesn't know...? Well, I mean I didn't dig hard into UEFI, for short. Hence my question. Off-topic, I admit...
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324874 · Apprentice Joined: 26 Jul 2014 Posts: 168

The previous post has been removed due to changes and therefore it was no longer relevant in this thread.

Best regards, feng.

AaylaSecura · Tux's lil' helper Joined: 09 Jun 2011 Posts: 122

VinzC · Posted: Wed Aug 24, 2016 11:14 am Post subject:

Thanks a lot, AaylaSecura. May the Force be with you ;-)

.
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Catanduva · Posted: Thu Sep 22, 2016 9:18 am Post subject:

nvidia_drivers + simple_fb is working even with DRM active. Ugly big old school console tty, but at least it works.
With efi_fb i got a black screen. It boots and i can login and do startx, but console is just black.

It would be nice to have a bigger console, but i can live with that.

Mapt · n00b Joined: 04 Sep 2017 Posts: 5

My current state (december 2019):

wolfieh · n00b Joined: 17 Nov 2009 Posts: 54

I've been using efifb for a while with no issues (proprietary drivers). You need to disable the CONFIG_X86_SYSFB (Mark VGA/VBE/EFI FB as generic system framebuffer) kernel option for it to work, and set video mode with GRUB