Hi all … My PC is almost unusable due to the performance of Mesa since a kernel upgrade has broken Nvidia driver support for me. I have a GeForce 1660 GTX IIRC.
I have tried changing drivers using preferred Ubuntu method, and also manually downloading a .run from Nvidia, and installing that. Before I go the route of backup and new Install … which may/not work for me in solving my issue, has anyone else any wisdom for me?
It’s not only you. Ubuntu broke both my laptop and work computer with a kernel update on the same day, I use Intel Graphics.
will never trust/use Ubuntu after this
both of those reports lack any details and as such will be ignored as ranting.
Ignore whatever you want…
You might asked for help in a more specialized forum. In Germany we have ubuntuusers.de which gives excellent support as long you follow the rules and give all the information needed ;-).
Installing Nvidia drivers from their website is the cause.
It will only work for the moment, but as soon you update the kernel it will break. That’s why you need to install the drivers with you package manager.
Installing “random” things from some website is a windows/mac habit. On linux that is what you package manager is for.
For my Ubuntu based machine with a nvidia card I am unsing the Ubuntu graphics ppa and it has worked well for quite some time.
You probably just need to trigger dkms to rebuild the driver though.
Thanks, Mica
Yup. I haven’t seen an Ubuntu kernel upgrade break NVidia drivers in a long time. Ubuntu kernels are far enough behind mainline that by the time Ubuntu releases even a non-LTS, NVidia has already handled any potential compatibility issues on their side.
So far I’ve also had no issues even with the CUDA repos from nvidia.com (which at least are still installed using .deb and do install proper DKMS support), those are needed for DaVinci Resolve.
(I’m nervous as hell about 21.04 though, as right now I’m depending on the 20.04 CUDA releases working on 20.10… The distro packages correspond roughly to the “game-ready” driver series on Windows and you need “studio” drivers for Resolve to be stable.)
I’m on (K)Ubuntu 21.04, kernel 5.11.0-16-lowlatency, nVidia driver 460.73.01-0ubuntu1, and darktable is running fine with OpenCL. No CUDA-related stuff (libcuda, nvidia-cuda) is installed. I don’t use DaVinci Resolve, so can’t give you feedback on that.
OK; I finally tumbled to the source of my problem - me! 
ish 
Well, a driver for a wifi dongle (that I installed) that caused the dkms rebuilds to fail.
I have gone ahead with a new Kubuntu 20.04.02 LTS installation on a different partition anyway.
Sorry for the unnecessary noise … we return you now to your regular programming! 
@martin.scharnke @rodlie there has been a clash between Intel onboard and Nvidia PCI graphics on Linux for quite some time. The Arch devs declared recently they are no longer prepared to support Nvidia unless and until the OEMs sort it out. That’s not taking sides. It’s difficult to support a graphics card without a mobo.
I haven’t heard of any such clash with AMD based mobos. But then, the onboard graphics appear to be more than sufficient anyway.
I don’t use Nvidia on the computers affected, Intel only. The kernel update messed up Mesa.
This was work machines, I expected better from an LTS release (don’t break my stuff).
how do you trigger a dkms rebuild?
Morning, @CpILL and welcome!
I’d say that it depends on what operating system you are using.
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden