Need help with nvidia drivers on linux

[KableCH]

Hey guys!

Recently I decided to give linux a try and after a few hours of watching youtube videos about different distros and trying a few I grabbed an old unused ssd and installed arch linux on it. Now I'm struggling with the nvidia drivers for it. Before I explain further, please know that I'm a complete noob when it comes to linux and if this is really obvious, please don't hate me. I thought maybe someone can help me out in this forum, because googling gives me a lot of outdated information and I don't know what to do anymore.

 

My setup:

CPU: Intel i7-5960X

Main board: Asus ROG Rampage V Extreme

RAM: Corsair Dominator 64GB

GPUs: 2x GTX1080 Founders edition in sli

Boot SSD: Samsung 950 Pro NVME  (This is the boot drive for my windows installation, I want arch linux to eventually live on here aswell)

Storage SSD: Samsung 850 Pro (I'm using this one for programs and files I use frequently)

Storage HDDs: 2x WD Blacks (These are for mass storage of video, music etc)

Monitors: 2x Asus PA279Q (Right monitor is plugged into the top GPU via Display Port, Left Monitor is daisy chained to the right one)

This is probably too much information, but whatever

 

My use case:

I use my pc for gaming of course, but also I'm a hobby web developer and I xampp installed along with composer, symfony-cli and some other things. Other than that I do very light photo and video editing and occasionally I use MS Office.

 

What I had on windows and what I want to get on linux (if possible):

- I "rerouted" the quick access directories like "Downloads", "Documents", "Pictures" etc to one of my HDDs (Right click > Properties > Location). This will probably be acheived on linux by mounting the drive at /mnt/home/SOMEDIR (?)

- I installed a lot programs on the 850 Pro, and basically all my steam library. If possible I'd like to keep steam on this drive on linux, programs aren't a big deal though.

- I want to have my PHP IDE (PHPStorm), an apache server and composer on the linux machine. I actually tried this yesterday and everything worked fine except the symfony-cli gave me the error "No php binaries found", which makes me think that I need to add it to the path env variable. Maybe not but that's a solution I had to do on windows once. Doesn't really matter because this thread isn't about that

 

What I did on my linux install:

Basically I followed the installation guide on the arch wiki and I installed gnome with 

pacman -S xorg gdm gnome gnome-terminal nautilus gnome-tweaks gnome-control-center gnome-backgrounds adwaita-icon-theme arc-gtk-theme

and rebooted. I don't really know all the right terms here I'm sorry if I get this wrong, but after that, the machine booted to the Login manager, I could log in to my account and got to the gnome desktop. All good so far.

Then I tried to install the nvidia drivers according to arch wiki page regarding nvidia. I ran 

lspci -k | grep -A 2 -E "(VGA|3D)"

and got this output

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080]
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau
--
02:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] (rev a1)
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080]
	Kernel driver in use: nouveau

According to Nouveau wiki's code name page my cards have the code name NV134 (GP104). These are fairly new cards and not on in nvidia's legacy card list (ofc). I am now at the Installation step 3 on the wiki, so I ran 

pacman -S nvidia-lts nvidia-settings

I read somewhere that if I used nvidia-lts during the installation process I should use nvidia-lts here. After rebooting the system I couldn't get back to the Login Manager, but instead I got back stuck at this terminal (Once again sorry if I'm using the wrong terms here) where you can press CTRL+ALT+F2 to log in as root or any user, the same terminal you see during the installation process of arch. This really confused me because I expected to have either no display output or weird resolutions/only one monitor/some kind of other issue but not that I would lose the desktop environment but oh well I kept going according to the wiki.

On the NVIDIA/Tips and Tricks page i found that you can run 

nvidia-xconfig --busid=PCI:1:0:0 --sli=AA

to generate the config file at /etc/X11/xorg.conf which i did and got this config file

# nvidia-xconfig: X configuration file generated by nvidia-xconfig
# nvidia-xconfig:  version 435.21

Section "ServerLayout"
    Identifier     "Layout0"
    Screen      0  "Screen0"
    InputDevice    "Keyboard0" "CoreKeyboard"
    InputDevice    "Mouse0" "CorePointer"
EndSection

Section "Files"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Mouse0"
    Driver         "mouse"
    Option         "Protocol" "auto"
    Option         "Device" "/dev/psaux"
    Option         "Emulate3Buttons" "no"
    Option         "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
    # generated from default
    Identifier     "Keyboard0"
    Driver         "kbd"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier     "Monitor0"
    VendorName     "Unknown"
    ModelName      "Unknown"
    Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Section "Device"
    Identifier     "Device0"
    Driver         "nvidia"
    VendorName     "NVIDIA Corporation"
    BusID          "PCI:1:0:0"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
    Identifier     "Screen0"
    Device         "Device0"
    Monitor        "Monitor0"
    DefaultDepth    24
    Option         "SLI" "AA"
    SubSection     "Display"
        Depth       24
    EndSubSection
EndSection

Trying to boot with this config didn't work either. If I try to verify that sli is enabled with 

nvidia-settings -q all | grep SLIMode

I get

No protocol specified
Unable to init server: Could not connect: Connection refused

ERROR: The control display is undefined; please run `nvidia-settings --help` for usage information.

Not sure what to do from here. I tried to run other distros like manjaro and popos off of a usb drive to see what they have installed but I couldn't really figure it out, and popos would even crash 2 seconds after loading the desktop every time.

Sorry for this long post, but I would really appreciate your help on this :)

Oh and yes I know that arch linux might be a bit much for a beginner but I like tinkering with this stuff and as long as I still have windows on a drive I don't need to worry.

[Ashleyyyy]

you said you tried Pop OS, which one did you try? they have a dedicated ISO for Nvidia users which should work with your gpu's out of the box. i would recommend trying that one. i've had good luck with it on my system when i had an nvidia card in it, but that was a 600 series so i'm not sure how well the 1080's will work. regardless i recommend trying it. 

[KableCH]

Just now, Twilight said:

you said you tried Pop OS, which one did you try? they have a dedicated ISO for Nvidia users which should work with your gpu's out of the box. i would recommend trying that one. i've had good luck with it on my system when i had an nvidia card in it, but that was a 600 series so i'm not sure how well the 1080's will work. regardless i recommend trying it. 

I have tried the nvidia iso. Will try it again now. Are there any bios settings I'm not aware of that I need to set? On windows everything gpu/sli related runs fine..

[Ashleyyyy]

2 minutes ago, KableCH said:

I have tried the nvidia iso. Will try it again now. Are there any bios settings I'm not aware of that I need to set? On windows everything gpu/sli related runs fine..

SLI is a massive pain in the ass on linux with almost no support for it. don't expect it to work. 

 

be sure to try the 19.04 Nvidia iso. it is the most up to date. 

 

in terms of bios you shouldn't have to change anything if Windows runs ok. 

Edited September 12, 2019 by Twilight
typo

[Sauron]

42 minutes ago, KableCH said:

-things-

Try going through the wiki's troubleshooting page, starting from here. Also try using a single graphics card first, SLI is its own can of worms and first you should try to get one gpu working.