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I am reading an installation procedure and it indicates "remove nouveau drivers" (as indicated in the docs)

My question is why is it necessary to do this? What are the benefits or effect?

Also when I do this

lsmod | grep nouveau

Nothing appears. Is it still necessary to remove the drivers?

KansaiRobot
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  • It is a procedure for installing an internal software. Apparently it requires removing nouveau and I want to learn what are the effects of that – KansaiRobot Apr 14 '23 at 08:35
  • Please do not use comments to add info for the question. Edit the question and add the info. Comments are for anyone trying to help ask for more info. – David Apr 14 '23 at 09:42
  • @David The documentation linked to in the question says to disable Nouveau, not to remove it, so adding a comment about removing Nouveau to the question would be erroneous. – karel Apr 14 '23 at 09:45

1 Answers1

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According to the documentation linked to in the question To install the Display Driver, the Nouveau drivers must first be disabled. This disables the Nouveau driver, but it does not uninstall it.

When installing a proprietary graphics driver, it is not necessary to uninstall the built-in Nouveau open source graphics driver. The two graphics drivers can be installed alongside each other allowing the open source graphics driver to be used as a fallback alternative in case there is a problem using the proprietary graphics driver after installing or updating it. If you can enter into recovery mode from the grub boot menu you can enable the Nouveau driver from there by changing options nouveau modeset=0 to options nouveau modeset=1 in /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf.

karel
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  • if the result of the command lsmod | grep nouveau is nothing, does that mean the drivers are disabled already? – KansaiRobot Apr 14 '23 at 08:50
  • If the result of the command lsmod | grep nouveau is nothing, that means you are not using the Nouveau driver in the current session, but even so it might still be enabled so that it could be used as a fallback driver if necessary in a different session. If you are not using the Nouveau driver in the current session, maybe you're using the Nvidia proprietary graphics driver instead. – karel Apr 14 '23 at 08:52
  • what does "Regenerate the kernel initramfs" mean? – KansaiRobot Apr 14 '23 at 09:01
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    initramfs is a root filesystem that is embedded into the kernel and loaded at an early stage of the boot process which provides early userspace which can do things the kernel can't easily do by itself during the boot process. "Regenerate the kernel initramfs" refers to refreshing initramfs as would be appropriate to do after making changes to the system which require refreshing it. – karel Apr 14 '23 at 09:04