Re: My Fedora 40 experiences

Stephen Morris <samorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> · Thu, 16 May 2024 23:10:45 +1000

On 16/5/24 22:13, John Pilkington wrote:
On 16/05/2024 12:33, George N. White III wrote:
On Thu, May 16, 2024 at 6:46 AM Stephen Morris 
<samorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx <mailto:samorris@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>> wrote:

    I used dnf to system-upgrade to F40, which downloaded all the 
relevant
    packages, and then I rebooted through dnf.

Did you do all the steps in 
<https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/ 
<https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/quick-docs/upgrading-fedora-offline/>>? 

    The restart updated all the packages and automatically rebooted 
when it
    was finished.
    When the grub menu was displayed after the reboot it was obvious 
that
    the upgrade did not update the grub config as there was no entry to
    boot
    off the F40 installed kernel.
    I booted to the display manager which I think is still gdm, and the
    first thing I noticed there was the "plasma on xorg" selection 
had been
    removed but the "Gnome on xorg" and "Gnome Classic on xorg" were 
still
    there.
    I selected the "Plasma" entry and booted into Plasma.
    Having loaded Plasma I then went into the system entries menu and 
went
    through all the options again, and it was obvious from this that the
    display options I had configured with F39 had been wiped with F40. I
    configured the display settings again and set the new HDR option 
as I
    have a HDR monitor.
    After the configuration changes I rebuilt the grub menus using
    grub2-mkconfig to get a boot entry for the new kernel, and rebooted.
    With the reboot from the new kernel, and for that matter any of the
    older kernels, I got a message that the nvidia driver was not 
found and
    it was falling back to the nouveau driver, I don't know how as the
    nvidia driver was black listed in the grub menus.

Which nvidia driver was blacklisted (nouveau or nvidia-???)? There 
have been
problems with older Nvidia cards.  Were you using nouveau on F39 or 
nvidia, and
how did you install the nvidia driver (there are multiple sites with 
different installers).
My old iMac uses 470xx from rpmfusion, which was initially in 
no-maintainer status
and required a simple patch to run on current kernels.  Last I check 
the driver was in
testing.

      From the display manager I loaded Plasma as I did after the first
    upgrade boot, and Plasma displayed a black screen and never went any
    further, irrespective of how long I left it for, and the only way I
    could get out of that state was to use the physical reset button 
on the
    computer.
    On reboot, if I selected "Gnome" or "Gnome on Xorg", gnome would 
start
    up quite happily, but logging out and starting Plasma would still 
hang
    the computer.
    So rebooting again to the display manager login screen, I used
    ctrl+alt+F2 to switch to a terminal login process. Logging into the
    terminal the first thing I did was use mokutil to check the uefi 
status
    and it told me that uefi was disabled even though it was enabled 
in the
    bios.
    I checked whether the signing key was enrolled and it was, but the
    system wasn't using the nvidia driver even though it was 
installed, and
    a reinstall of kmod-nvidia and akmod-nvidia did nothing to alleviate
    the
    issue.

Many users have had problems with the akmod-nvida install.  For 470xx
the module failed to compile.  For newer cards, users sometimes end up
with unsigned drivers.  This usually means they rebooted too quickly 
(during
the window after the module was compiled but before it was signed.).

    So I uninstalled the kmod-nvidia module, and did a force 
re-enroll of
    the uefi signed key (potentially with a new key), and then 
rebooted to
    go through the mokutil enrolment required at boot. This did not 
resolve
    the Plasm start issue, so I loaded Gnome.
    Once in Gnome I started Firefox Nightly to do some net searches 
to see
    if I could find a solution, and the one thing that did happen at 
this
    point was the boot did not display the "falling back to nouveau"
    message, but the start of firefox displayed a message that a gpu
    couldn't be found on pci. Looking for a resolution to this I 
found an
    entry about, as part of installed nvidia drivers, to ensure the gpu
    firmware was also installed.
    So I did a dnf install nvidia-gpu-firmware which was then 
installed as
    it hadn't been already.

If you had installed nvidia-??? from a 3rd party repo the Fedora 
firmware
package might not be required, but it is needed for nouveau.

    After installing the firmware I rebooted and started Plasma, which
    successfully started without issues, and when I checked the video
    driver
    it was finally using the nvidia driver.
    This was a lot of work to resolve, and is the worst experience 
I've had
    with any fedora system upgrade.

Blame Nvidia for forcing Fedora into convoluted workarounds instead of
helping make older hardware work on current kernels.

Rpmfusion is having difficulties finding volunteers to package software.
Fewer volunteers have access to older hardware and those that do are
getting old themselves and may be dealing with the problems facing older
people in our society, so rpmfusion falls down in their priority list.

--
George N. White III

I have two F40 systems using nvidia GT_710 cards, both 'dnf upgraded' 
a few minutes ago.  It's beginning to look good, but it has been a 
painful experience.

I'm using the 470.239.06 driver from rpmfusion and the 
plasma-workspace-x11 package from fedora-upgrades, with the "Desktop 
Session: Plasma (X11)" selected on login.

With the same driver and the Wayland desktop I have found all cpus 
maxed out, with keyboard and mouse almost unusable.  On one system 
this still makes login awkward.

I believe that this support of x11 has been championed by two 
individuals, and the Fedora KDE SIG disowns that effort.  Clearly 
things are going to be fragile for some time.

Before today's upgrade one system frequently reported graphics resets. 
That seems to have been fixed.

HTH

John P
When I was using F39 I was using Plasma on X11 and I was having desktop 
scaling issues with Wayland. With the upgrade to F40 the Plasma on X11 
option disappeared, which was being put forward in discussions, but my 
biggest issue with Plasma was my display configuration was wiped by the 
upgrade. I had scaling at 150% and full rgb hinting, after the upgrade I 
had go and put those back. There was a HDR option in the display 
settings which was new, but I wouldn't have thought that would be 
sufficient to justify wiping the settings.

regards,
Steve

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