On Fri, May 4, 2018 at 1:34 PM Junayeed Ahnaf via arch-general < arch-general@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > > So here's what happened, I was facing issue with proprietary nVidia driver > (screen tearing) so I thought I want to switch to the free one, so I > uninstalled nvidia with "pacman -Rs nvidia" , then I thought might as well > try a different kernel and installed zen. Now when I boot into either > kernel I am seeing "Starting display manager" then a black screen. I can > login to tty2 , but no display comes up. > > I want to switch back to free driver, with preferably zen kernel. What > should I do? Thanks in advance. > I just hit a similar issue when trying to switch from nvidia to nouveau. I was trying to switch from i3/Xorg to sway/Wayland. The proprietary nvidia driver is unsupported with sway. I uninstalled the nvidia modules like you did, disabled the lightdm display manager, and booted into nouveau. It worked but was much too slow to be usable with my 4K display. I was getting major lag. It was like getting 1 HZ refresh rate moving my mouse pointer around. I switched back to i3/Xorg with the nvidia modules but when rebooting to test, it failed with a black screen like you got. When I tried "sudo modprobe nvidia" I got an "exec format error" message and the nvidia module refused to load. The nvidia module installed to the extramodules directory so I expected it to work with the 4.16.4 kernel I'm running even though it was built on 4.16.1, but apparently that is not the case. Uninstalling and reinstalling nvidia and nvidia-utils did not fix things. Eventually I gave up and did a "zfs rollback" to restore the previous system state and everything was fine after that. Sorry I don't have good solution for you, but I wanted to chime in that I also encountered the same problem and it was related to the nvidia modules not being loadable. Regards, Eric
