NVIDIA card and Nouveau

So with the new box I ordered a NVidia GeForce GT 640 Grafx card. I need some desktop realestate and thus a very high resolution card. This one came very good in the middle from a price and performance perspective.

Since a couple of kernel version ago Linux comes with the OpenSource nouveau drivers which are the alternative for the official NVidia drivers which are still closed source. I’m not that kind of guys who buys a very good piece of machinery to let it cripple by incomplete drivers. (No offence to the Nouveau developers. It’s not their fault NVidia doesn’t play nice with the open-source world.) So I do want to use the official drivers but that lets you run into some problem since the Nouveau drivers are loaded by default.

This calls for some blacklisting so you add in /etc/modprobe.d a new file called blacklist-nouveau.conf with a oneliner:

blacklist nouveau

This prevents the nouveau driver from being loaded at boot time. At least that’s what you think 🙁

Then install the official NVidia driver with “yum localinstall “.

It turns out that the nouveau driver is also statically compiled into the kernel boot image so you have to copy or rename that one and use dracut to create a new one which also takes your balcklisted nouveau driver into account:

#> dracut -f /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Then reboot the system once more ad you’re done.

The lsmod shows you a line like this:
nvidia              11262717  41
and the nouveau driver is out of the picture.

Cheers
Erwin

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