Black screen on boot with nvidia-340 driver

[stafio]

I added the ppa https://launchpad.net/~kelebek333/+a.../nvidia-legacy and then installed the nvidia drivers from the Driver Manager. After rebooting I ended up on a black screen that was unresponsive to any keyboard/mouse actions. Rebooting into recovery mode and uninstalling the driver was the only way I could find to get back into my desktop environment on boot.

[Schwarzer Kater]

Welcome.

This driver is, of course, not supported by Canonical or Kubuntu 24.04 LTS…

Did you follow the instructions on the PPA's website? If yes: which parts?
Generally it would increase your chance that somebody can actually help you with your problem a lot, if you would provide details about all of your hardware, about software, the exact steps you took and your general set-up!

[TinyTim]

True Black Kitten, there are so many variables none of it is simple, all of the information down to the last dot is relevant.
NVIDIA officials say 340.108 drivers are supported only for Linux kernels up to Linux 5.4.

[stafio]

I definitely know this driver old and not supported by Canonical or Kubuntu 24.04 LTS, but I have managed to get the Nvidia proprietary driver to work and have been using it up until now.

Up until *buntu 22.10, I was able to use the nvidia-legacy ppa. As of 22.10, the ppa package no longer worked. At that point, I found I could download the nvidia-legacy packages from Debian Sid and install them, getting the proprietary driver working.

The ppa recently started getting updates again for the nvidia-340 driver, so I went back to using it after upgrading to 24.04. I added the ppa following the instructions on the main page:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:kelebek333/nvidia-legacy
sudo apt update​

Following that, I opened the Driver Manager from System Settings and was able to select the proprietary driver from there and install it. As far as I could tell, it installed without issue. After rebooting, my computer ended up on a black screen and was unresponsive to any input. I actually tried installing the nvidia-legacy packages from Debian Sid again and experienced the same thing. Understanding this is not a typical approach, but it worked on the previous *buntu version.

The fact that I was able to get the driver working following the above approaches until now leads me to believe there's either an incompatibility with the 6.8.0-31 kernel and the driver, or something in the latest Kubuntu 24.04 release. I'm just not sure how to determine what the issue could be.

lspci output:

00:00.0 Host bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor DRAM Controller (rev 09)
00:01.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation Xeon E3-1200 v2/3rd Gen Core processor PCI Express Root Port (rev 09)
00:14.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family USB xHCI Host Controller (rev 04)
00:16.0 Communication controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family MEI Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1a.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #2 (rev 04)
00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family High Definition Audio Controller (rev 04)
00:1c.0 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 1 (rev c4)
00:1c.4 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 5 (rev c4)
00:1c.5 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 82801 PCI Bridge (rev c4)
00:1c.6 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 7 (rev c4)
00:1c.7 PCI bridge: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family PCI Express Root Port 8 (rev c4)
00:1d.0 USB controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family USB Enhanced Host Controller #1 (rev 04)
00:1f.0 ISA bridge: Intel Corporation Z77 Express Chipset LPC Controller (rev 04)
00:1f.2 SATA controller: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C210 Series Chipset Family 6-port SATA Controller [AHCI mode] (rev 04)
00:1f.3 SMBus: Intel Corporation 7 Series/C216 Chipset Family SMBus Controller (rev 04)
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation G86 [GeForce 8500 GT] (rev a1)
03:00.0 Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet Controller
(rev 09)
04:00.0 PCI bridge: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1083/1085 PCIe to PCI Bridge (rev 03)
06:00.0 Network controller: Qualcomm Atheros AR9287 Wireless Network Adapter (PCI-Express) (rev 01)
07:00.0 USB controller: ASMedia Technology Inc. ASM1042 SuperSpeed USB Host Controller
​

If there's any other information I can provide, just let me know how to get it.

[claydoh]

The problem is, these drivers have been patched to build against the newer kernels. The whole problem is that Nvidia no longer supports the drivers, so it takes intrepid folks trying to hack the open source "shim" to get the now-ancient proprietary driver code to work with recent kernels. Patches often have to be edited to account for other changes and security fixes in these updated kernels. And the PPA creator may or may not have the skills to do that.

The changelog for the most recent PPA package for Noble shows that he is now using the Debian patches. But kernel differences and changes still have an effect

Changelog

nvidia-graphics-drivers-340 (340.108-4ppanoble9.2) noble; urgency=medium

* Switch to Debian Sid patches (So we can workaround removed drm_legacy.h file from Linux 6.8 issue).
* Added dracut support.
* Fix clean command on dkms.conf.

Are you sure the nouveau driver isn't actually better on these old GPUs than the legacy driver these days?

[stafio]

Are you sure the nouveau driver isn't actually better on these old GPUs than the legacy driver these days?

Sadly, yes. Unless there's some special settings I need to manually set somewhere, the nouveau drivers are definitely poor in comparison. Video playback of a 1080p video stutters for me with nouveau and as I write this, the max resolution available is 1024x728. I was running at 1280x1024 with the nvidia driver. I'm just seeing now that may also be in part a KDE/Wayland issue, as I see this in the information popup next to Resolution in the Display Configuration:

"1024x768 (4:3)" is the only resolution supported by this display.

Using unsupported resolutions was possible in the Plasma X11 session, but they were never guaranteed to work and are not available in this Plasma Wayland session.

The odd thing about that is I don't even have the plasma-workspace-wayland package installed, so I don't believe I can possibly be running plasma.

[Schwarzer Kater]

If they already use Debian's patches now - did you try Debian with KDE Plasma or something like siduction instead?

[claydoh]

The odd thing about that is I don't even have the plasma-workspace-wayland package installed, so I don't believe I can possibly be running plasma.

No, Plasma runs in both.

[stafio]

If they already use Debian's patches now - did you try Debian with KDE Plasma or something like siduction instead?

I have not at this point. Kubuntu has been my OS of choice for years and I would like to stick with it.

No, Plasma runs in both.

That was a typo in my comment, I meant to say "Wayland". The message mentions Wayland, but I a not running Wayland.