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NVIDIA – Incompatible with Fedora 23 Xorg – and a Workaround..

Adventures With Linux ™ Posted on by

Just updated to Fedora 23, and the NVIDIA driver would not load/run.. (tested with the latest – 358.09 and 352.55)

================ WARNING WARNING WARNING WARNING ================
This server has a video driver ABI version of 20.0 that this
driver does not officially support. Please check
http://www.nvidia.com/ for driver updates or downgrade to an X
server with a supported driver ABI.
=================================================================
(EE) NVIDIA: Use the -ignoreABI option to override this check.
(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) no screens found(EE)
(EE)
Please consult the Fedora Project support
 at http://wiki.x.org
 for help.
(EE) Please also check the log file at "/var/log/Xorg.0.log" for additional information.
(EE)
(EE) Server terminated with error (1). Closing log file.
xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to X server: Connection refused
xinit: server error

There is a wealth of forum traffic on this, and all the ‘solutions’ are a bit messy, but I opted to downgrade the Xorg server for the time being, to the version used for Fedora 22.   There are several dependencies, so I used:

# dnf --allowerasing --releasever=22 downgrade xorg-x11-server-Xorg

This fixed the problem, but you also need to be careful to prevent updates during the normal update cycle..

The real fix will be when NVIDIA releases a driver that supports the ‘new’ Xorg 1.18 API…

Addendum:

To prevent dnf updates from reinstalling the F23 versions, add exclude=xorg-x11* to /etc/dnf/dnf.conf (but remember to remove this, when the correct driver is available..)

Robert Gadsdon.  November 5, 2015

 

Comments

NVIDIA – Incompatible with Fedora 23 Xorg – and a Workaround.. — 13 Comments

  2. I’m holding off on installing the nvidia drivers until they’re updated — any suggestion as to how I can be notified of the update?

    Reply ↓

  3. Thanks for the downgrade tip, but even so, Nvidia is totally useless on f23.

    I’ve had the exact same problem as you, and downgraded xorg so the 352.55 driver will load and i have an X display. But you can’t even watch a 720p video on a GTX 960 – the nvidia drivers show that even watching a lowres video on a 1080p display loads the GPU to 40% or so, and if you move your vlc or mplayer window to a 4K display, it’s too much. You get about 5 frames per second, absolutely unwatchable.

    With older kernels and older nvidia drivers, watching a 720p or 1080p video on the 4K display was effortless.

    Now I’ve downgraded the Xorg, I’ll try reverting (tomorrow) to an older nvidia driver. I only went for the 352.55 because the older nvidia drivers wouldn’t even compile with the new kernel/xorg. Now I’ve downgraded Xorg, maybe the older driverts will work. But I suspect the newer f23 kernel has also broken the older nvidia drivers, so i expect I’ll be out of luck.

    So, I’m pretty sure the situation is this:

    You can’t watch a video with nvidia drivers on Fedora 23.

    What a complete, & utter abortion.

    Reply ↓

    • I have a GT640, with driver 352.55 on FC23, with an LG E4221 1080P display, and vlc, kodi, etc all work OK, after the ‘downgrade’..
      The only frustration is that I can only use # dnf for updates, as yumex-dnf ignores the xorg-xxx exceptions in dnf.conf..
      The other nuisance (nothing to do with NVIDIA..) is that video thumbnails refuse to display at all, despite (re)installing several versions of ffmpegthunbs etc. including the version that is supposed to be updated for KF5..
      The only thing I can suggest – if you haven’t done it already – is to post this on the NVIDIA forum ( https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/board/98/ )

      RG.

      Reply ↓

  4. Well i can now confirm that even with Xorg downgraded, and booting into f22 kernel, i can’t install the older nvidia driver i was using (346.xx). From the nvidia-installer.log, it looks like the new gcc in f23 has broken the older nvidia driver.

    Effing brilliant. This is just a tour-de-force of software development genius isn’t it.

    How is it, that Windows can go year after year without breaking ABI or any other compatibilities that will break an nvidia driver, and yet Linux/GNU/Xorg can’t go 3 months without raping its unfortunate users.

    Reply ↓

  5. So on f23 I’m stuck with this 352.55 driver which is so bad i have GPU utilisation of 40% on my GTX 960 when viewing a lowres video on a 1080p screen.

    Booting into kubuntu or debian, with 346 nvidia driver, i have GPU utilisation of 1%, when viewing the same video on a 4K resolution screen.

    This 352.55 is a disaster.

    Reply ↓

  6. according to nvidia:
    “There is no such thing as xserver 1.18 yet: the latest release is 1.17.99.902, also known as 1.18 release candidate 2. NVIDIA does not support prerelease or release candidate X servers, and it’s kind of surprising to me that Fedora would ship an official distribution release with beta software for something as fundamental as the X server.
    Support for the X server ABI in the upcoming xserver 1.18 release should be available in the next release of the NVIDIA driver.”

    Reply ↓

  7. I got it working with F23, Nvidia 358.09, and downgrade of xorg-x11-server-Xorg.

    Hint: Hold your mouth in the proper position and stand on your head while performing these tasks.

    Thanks guys!
    Chris

    Reply ↓

  10. Hello all,

    I have a brand new Gigabyte Laptop with 2 SSD’d and no hard drive onboard, but a 2Tb HD on on USB. OS was FC23, but now I have finally managed to get FC23KDE installed. I tried the if not true then false guide, but it failed when trying to build the 32 bit libraries, saying they didn’t exist. Can I try this again but say no to that option?

    Also tried the RPMFusion guide, to no avail – it failed on reboot with issues with switch root.

    Have had a devil of a time in general, FC installations only work in low res mode, Unbuntu and Kubuntu stall right near the start. Tried Ubuntu because it is supposed to install nvidia drivers implicitly during the installation.

    Wondering could this all be due to no on board HD? They were complaints at various stages about failing to find /dev/hdc.

    Thanks in advance :+)

    Reply ↓

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