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I had a perfectly working installation of Ubuntu 16.04 with a GTX-650Ti. It's been working for months...maybe a year. Unfortunately, I don't remember which drivers I installed because it was so long ago. Yesterday I installed the Cuda toolkit and rebooted. Now the machine boots to the grub menu and when I choose -79 (the version I'm running) the system continues the boot process to the crypt password screen and hangs. It doesn't accept input from the keyboard. However I can ctrl-alt-f2 and get to a "console" that echos keyboard input (letters show up on the blank black screen) but there is no command prompt and the computer doesn't respond to the input in any way (other than echoing it to the screen).

I can "recover" from this hang by rebooting to a recovery (root) prompt from the grub menu and purging the nvidia installation (apt-get purge nvidia*).

What have I tried? I've tried installing several different driver versions (304, 375, 381, 352, etc.). All versions do exactly as I have described above. I've tried adding nomodeset to the grub boot loader, but with the nvidia drivers installed I get the same behavior described above. I've tried getting to a command prompt and running sudo prime-select intel. Same behavior as described above. I got the ideas about nomodeset and prime-select from this post: Ubuntu 16.04 + Nvidia Driver = Blank screen.

The result of ubuntu-drivers devices is:

== /sys/devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:01.0/0000:01:00.0 ==
vendor   : NVIDIA Corporation
modalias : pci:v000010DEd000011C6sv00003842sd00003653bc03sc00i00
model    : GK106 [GeForce GTX 650 Ti]
driver   : nvidia-370 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-375 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-340 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-304 - distro non-free
driver   : nvidia-378 - third-party free
driver   : nvidia-381 - third-party free recommended
driver   : xserver-xorg-video-nouveau - distro free builtin

== cpu-microcode.py ==
driver   : intel-microcode - distro non-free

To be clear, my video works when the Nouveau driver is in play, just not my GPU...in other words I can't play video games or start learning about CudaCore computing. It's the Cudo core GPU that I need to get working. And to reiterate: it WAS working until I installed the Cuda toolkit. Now I've uninstalled the Cuda toolkit and still can't get any of the available nvidia drivers working.

So now I'm turning to you-all for more ideas. How can I get this thing working again?

JohnCroc
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  • Check in your /etc/X11 folder and see if there are any xorg.conf.xxxxxx backup files or if you actually have a xorg.conf file. If you don't have the xorg.conf file but you do have backups, move the most recent one back to xorg.conf and reboot. – Terrance Jun 09 '17 at 14:34
  • I found a xorg.conf.failsafe file there, and cp'd it to xorg.conf. Unfortunately, all that did was made Nouveau the active video driver (same as sudo apt-get purge nvidia*). I probably should have said, my video works when Nouveau's the active driver, but the GPU isn't available to render video for games or for the Cuda toolkit. THAT's what I need to get working. – JohnCroc Jun 10 '17 at 17:31
  • Have you tried installing the drivers from the graphics-drivers ppa? – Terrance Jun 10 '17 at 19:16
  • Yes. This is where I got the drivers I've tried. I have also tried proprietary drivers from nvidia. – JohnCroc Jun 10 '17 at 20:01
  • Tried using grub to load -78. It works! Double-checked which video drivers are loaded...nvidia 381! maybe it's an incompatibility with -79? going to load the phoronixtest sweet to see if that will work, then possibly the cuda toolkit. I'll post more when I know more. – JohnCroc Jun 10 '17 at 20:34
  • It could be. I have had issues when I have upgraded the kernel and the NVIDIA 381 drivers stopped working properly. – Terrance Jun 10 '17 at 20:35

1 Answers1

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I found that when I backed off to Linux kernel 4.8.0-78 (I had all the trouble, above with -79) I was able to install the Cuda Library and everything worked.

I theorize that there may be some incompatibility between the drivers and the newest kernel version, but I don't have the tools or the knowledge to find out for certain.

To recap my solution procedure, I selected Advanced Ubuntu Options from the GRUB menu and booted the previous version (prior to the upgrade to -79). I then made sure the GPU was in play by running the Phoronix Test Suite. It was, so with fingers crossed I ran the install that had hosed things sudo apt-get install git cmake libcryptopp-dev libleveldb-dev libjsoncpp-dev libjsonrpccpp-dev libboost-all-dev libgmp-dev libreadline-dev libcurl4-gnutls-dev ocl-icd-libopencl1 opencl-headers mesa-common-dev libmicrohttpd-dev build-essential cuda -y and then tested again to make sure the GPU was still available, and it WAS.

JohnCroc
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