Xubuntu 22.04 black screen when prime-select is set to nvidia or on-demand

[dev-1one-w01f]

I recently migrated my Xubuntu 22.04 setup to a new laptop (Dell Precision 3580). After tinkering around for a few days, the Intel Iris Xe GPU works now. However, I just can't make the Nvidia RTX A500 working.

I am using Xubuntu with lightdm, Linux kernel 6.2.0-26-generic.

I have installed nvidia-driver-535 from apt, and the output of "sudo lshw -C video" show that none of the 2 GPUs are "UNCLAIMED".

However, whenever prime-select is set to nvidia or on-demand, Xubuntu boots into a black screen after unlocking the encrypted drive. At this point, if prime-select is set to nvidia, I can press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get a tty, login and use Xubuntu there. However, if prime-select is set to on-demand, then Ctrl+Alt+F1 has no effect and the machine remains stuck at the black screen.

I added a 10-nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf to my /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/ following https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVI..._graphics_only.

I also followed the https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/NVIDIA_Optimus#LightDM to add a display setup script to do this:

#!/bin/sh
echo "hello" > /tmp/hello.txt
xrandr --setprovideroutputsource modesetting NVIDIA-0
xrandr --auto

After adding this, Ctrl+Alt+F1 works even if prime-select is set to on-demand. When Xubuntu boots into a black screen, going to the tty I can see that /tmp/hello.txt is created, so the script did run.

I tried to set options nvidia-drm modeset=0 according to https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/...pdate/219727/6, but that didn't work.

https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/...107gl-a/258049 describes a similar symptom on Ubuntu 20.04 and says no issues on Ubuntu 22.04, but I'm already on 22.04.

https://www.reddit.com/r/openSUSE/comments/rubeqp/nvidia_optimus_black_screen_when_typing_sudo/?rdt=46936 describes a similar problem on openSUSE but I don't see a concrete solution there.

I also tried to make the driver load earlier by embedding it into initrd, as described in https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/...artup/168262/2, but that didn't change the outcome.

I also cleaned up all the stale xorg.conf files as suggested in https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/...-950m/160485/4, but that also didn't change the outcome.

At this point I'm out of ideas. Any pointers would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

[dev-1one-w01f]

With some more tinkering, I finally figured it out. It turns out there were some old config files such as 10-nvidia-brightness.conf and 10-nvidia.conf in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d that disrupted the setup. Additionally, the 10-nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf file is also not necessary.

After removing all 3 of those config files, now only 10-evdev.conf, 10-quirks.conf, 11-nvidia-offload.conf, 40-libinput.conf, 70-wacom.conf are left in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d. In particular, the 11-nvidia-offload.conf is generated by gpu-manager. This finally got rid of the black screen and now I can use the GUI again.

Hopefully this helps anyone who face a similar problem.

[MAFoElffen]

Strange. You said that 10-nvidia-conf was on of the files you removed, because it was causing problems with 22.04 and Linux Kernel 6.2.0-26-generic.

Did you keep the contents of it so you can post the contents of it (to compare with mine, which is still default)?

The reason I ask it that this is mine, which I am not having problems with...

mafoelffen@msi-ubuntu:~$ ls /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/
10-amdgpu.conf  10-quirks.conf  40-libinput.conf
10-nvidia.conf  10-radeon.conf  70-wacom.conf
mafoelffen@msi-ubuntu:~$ apt list nvidia-driver-* --installed
Listing... Done
nvidia-driver-530/jammy-updates,jammy-security,now 535.86.05-0ubuntu0.22.04.1 amd64 [installed]
nvidia-driver-535/jammy-updates,jammy-security,now 535.86.05-0ubuntu0.22.04.1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
mafoelffen@msi-ubuntu:~$ grep . /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia.conf
Section "OutputClass"
    Identifier "nvidia"
    MatchDriver "nvidia-drm"
    Driver "nvidia"
    Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"
    ModulePath "/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/nvidia/xorg"
EndSection
mafoelffen@msi-ubuntu:~$ uname -r
6.2.0-32-generic
mafoelffen@msi-ubuntu:~$ lsb_release -d
Description:    Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS

It was not having problems with Kernel 6.2.0-26 (though my laptop had other challenges where it would not reboot without going to the BIOS boot menu).