NVIDIA/nvidia-drivers

x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers is the proprietary graphics driver for nVidia graphic cards. An open source alternative is nouveau.

The nVidia drivers in the tree are released by nVidia and are built against the Linux kernel. They contain a binary blob that does the heavy lifting for talking to the card. The drivers consist of two parts, a kernel module, and an X11 driver. Both parts are included in a single package. Due to the way nVidia has been packaging their drivers, you will need to make some choices before you install the drivers.

The nvidia-drivers package contains the latest drivers from nVidia with support for all cards, with several versions available depending on how old your card is. It uses an eclass to detect what kind of card you're running so that it installs the proper version.

Hardware Compatibility
The package supports a range of available nVidia cards. Multiple versions are available for installation, depending on the card(s) you have. See the official nVidia documentation, What's a legacy driver?, on what version of nvidia-drivers you should use. A pretty decent way to find this out through an interactive form is offered here. Enter the graphics card you have (mind the Legacy option in the 'Product Type' field) and you should end up with the best supported version displayed beneath the form.

If you've identified your card as a legacy card you need to mask the more recent releases of, i.e

Note that Gentoo does not provide the 71.86.xx versions. If you have a card that need these drivers you are recommended to use the nouveau driver.

Kernel
As mentioned above, the nVidia kernel driver installs and runs against your current kernel. It builds as a module, so your kernel must support the loading of kernel modules (see below).

The kernel module (nvidia.ko) consists of a proprietary part (commonly known as the "binary blob") which drives your graphics chip(s), and an open source part (the "glue") which at runtime acts as intermediary between the proprietary part and the kernel. These all need to work nicely together or you could be faced with data loss (through kernel panics, X servers crashing with unsaved data in X applications) and even hardware failure (overheating and other power management related issues should spring to mind).

Kernel compatibility
From time to time, a new kernel release changes the internal ABI for drivers, which means all drivers that use those ABIs must be changed accordingly. For open source drivers, especially those distributed with the kernel, these changes are nearly trivial to fix since the entire chain of calls between drivers and other parts of the kernel can be reviewed quite easily. For proprietary drivers like nvidia.ko, it doesn't work quite the same. When the internal ABIs change, you cannot merely fix the "glue", because you cannot know how the glue is used by the proprietary part. If you do manage to patch things up and things seem to work nicely, you still risk that running nvidia.ko in your new, unsupported kernel will lead to data loss and hardware failure.

When a new, incompatible kernel version is released, it is probably best to stick with the newest supported kernel for a while. Nvidia usually takes a few weeks to prepare a new proprietary release they think is fit for general use. Just be patient. If you want to throw all caution to the wind, the nvidia-drivers ebuilds do support the epatch_user command from eutils.eclass: this allows you to patch nvidia-drivers to somehow fit in with the latest, unsupported kernel release you want to run. Do note that neither the nvidia-drivers maintainers nor Nvidia will support you when you run into trouble. Your hardware warranty will most likely be void, Gentoo's maintainers cannot begin to fix your issues since it's a proprietary driver that only Nvidia can properly debug, and the kernel maintainers (both Gentoo's and its upstream) will certainly not support proprietary drivers, or indeed any "tainted" system that happens to run into trouble.

Required kernel options
If you used genkernel all to configure the kernel for you, then you're all set. If not, double check your kernel configuration so that this support is enabled:

You also need to enable Memory Type Range Register in your kernel:

Also, if you have an AGP graphics card, you can optionally enable agpgart support to your kernel, either compiled in or as a module. If you do not use the in-kernel agpgart, then the drivers will use their own agpgart implementation, called NvAGP. On certain systems, this performs better than the in-kernel agpgart, and on others, it performs worse. You will need to evaluate this on your own system to get the best performance. If you are unsure what to do, use the in-kernel agpgart:

A framebuffer alternative is uvesafb, which can be installed parallel to nvidia-drivers.

The nvidia-drivers ebuild automatically discovers your kernel version based on the symlink. Please ensure that you have this symlink pointing to the correct sources and that your kernel is correctly configured. Please refer to the "Configuring the Kernel" section of the Gentoo Handbook for details on configuring your kernel.

First, you'll need to choose the right kernel source using eselect. If you are using gentoo-sources-3.7.10, your kernel listing might look something like this:

In the above output, you'll notice that the linux-3.7.10-gentoo kernel is marked with an asterisk (*) to show that it is the symlinked kernel.

If the symlink is not pointing to the correct sources, you must update the link by selecting the number of your desired kernel sources, as in the example above.

Drivers
Now it's time to install the drivers. You can do this by first following the X Server Configuration HOWTO and setting VIDEO_CARDS="nvidia" in. When you install the X server, it will then install the right version of nvidia-drivers for you.

Once the installation has finished, run modprobe nvidia to load the kernel module into memory. If this is an upgrade, you should remove the previous module first.

To prevent you having to manually load the module on every bootup, you probably want to have this done automatically each time you boot your system, so edit and add nvidia to it.

The X Server
Once the appropriate drivers are installed you need to configure your X Server to use the nvidia driver instead of the default nv driver.

Run eselect so that the X Server uses the nVidia GLX libraries:

Testing your Card
To test your nVidia card, fire up X and run glxinfo, which is part of the mesa-progs package. It should say that direct rendering is activated:

To monitor your FPS, run glxgears.

Enabling nvidia Support
Some tools, such as mplayer and xine-lib, use a local USE flag called xvmc which enables XvMCNVIDIA support, useful when watching high resolution movies. Add in xvmc in your USE variable in or add it as USE flag to media-video/mplayer and/or media-libs/xine-lib in.

GeForce 8 series and later GPUs do come with VDPAU support which superseded XvMCNVIDIA support. See the VDPAU article for enabling VDPAU support.

There are also some applications that use the nvidia USE flag, so you may want to add it to.

Then, run emerge -uD --newuse @world to rebuild the applications that benefit from the USE flag change.

Using NVidia Settings Tool
nVidia also provides you with a settings tool. This tool allows you to monitor and change graphical settings without restarting the X server and is available through Portage as media-video/nvidia-settings. As mentioned earlier, it will be pulled in automatically if you install the drivers with the gtk USE flag set in or in.

Enable OpenGL/OpenCL
To enable OpenGL and OpenCL.

You should make sure that the Xorg server is not running during these changes.

Driver fails to initialize when MSI interrupts are enabled
The Linux NVIDIA driver uses Message Signaled Interrupts (MSI) by default. This provides compatibility and scalability benefits, mainly due to the avoidance of IRQ sharing. Some systems have been seen to have problems supporting MSI, while working fine with virtual wire interrupts. These problems manifest as an inability to start X with the NVIDIA driver, or CUDA initialization failures.

MSI interrupts can be disabled via the NVIDIA kernel module parameter "NVreg_EnableMSI=0". This can be set on the command line when loading the module, or more appropriately via your distribution's kernel module configuration files (such as those under /etc/modprobe.d/).

Example:

Getting 2D acceleration to work on machines with 4GB memory or more
If you are having trouble with the nVidia 2D acceleration it is likely that you are unable to set up a write-combining range with MTRR. To verify, check the contents of :

Every line should contain "write-back" or "write-combining". If you see a line with "uncachable" in it you will need to change a BIOS setting to fix this.

Reboot and enter the BIOS, then find the MTRR settings (probably under "CPU Settings"). Change the setting from "continuous" to "discrete" and boot back into Linux. You will now find out that there is no "uncachable" entry anymore and 2D acceleration now works without any glitches.

When I attempt to load the kernel module, I receive a "no such device"
This is usually caused by one of the following issues:

1. You don't have an nVidia card at all. Check lspci output to confirm that you have an nVidia graphics card installed and detected.

2. The currently installed version of x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers does not support your graphics card model. Check the README file in /usr/share/nvidia-drivers-*/ for a list of supported devices, or use the driver search at http://www.geforce.com/drivers. See the Which Version section above.

3. Another kernel driver has control of the hardware. Check lspci -k to see if another driver like "nouveau" is bound to the graphics card. If so, you will need to disable or blacklist this driver.

Xorg says it can't find any screens
When you boot up your computer and end up with a black screen or a console prompt instead of your GUI; you can press Ctrl+Alt+F2 to bring up a console prompt if you don't already have one. Then you can run:

to see the output of Xorg. If one of the first errors is that Xorg can't find any screens, then follow these steps to resolve your issue.

It should be enough to run the following command before rebooting:

But if that doesn't work, run lspci and you'll find your video card starts off like this: 01:00.0 VGA compatible controller: make and model of videocard

Take the first bit, 01.00.0 and put it in your /etc/X11/xorg.conf with the BusID option:

Direct rendering is not enabled
If Direct rendering does not work, it may be because you have Direct Rendering Manager enabled in the kernel, which conflicts with the driver. You can see Direct rendering Status by following instructions in the section "Testing your card".

First, disable Direct Rendering Manager (CONFIG_DRM) in the kernel :

And rebuild x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers since the driver may have built against the kernel DRM symbols. It should fix your problem.

Documentation
The nVidia driver package also comes with comprehensive documentation. This is installed into /usr/share/doc and can be viewed with the following command:

Kernel module parameters
The nvidia kernel module accepts a number of parameters (options) which you can use to tweak the behaviour of the driver. Most of these are mentioned in the documentation. To add or change the values of these parameters, edit the file /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf. Remember to run update-modules after modifying this file, and bear in mind that you will need to reload the nvidia module before the new settings take effect.

Edit /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf in your favourite editor:

Update module information:

Unload the nvidia module...

...and load it once again:

Advanced X configuration
The GLX layer also has a plethora of options which can be configured. These control the configuration of TV out, dual displays, monitor frequency detection, etc. Again, all of the available options are detailed in the documentation.

If you wish to use any of these options, you need to list them in the relevant Device section of your X config file (usually /etc/X11/xorg.conf). For example, suppose I wanted to disable the splash logo:

Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the following authors and editors for their contributions to this guide: Sven Vermeulen, Joshua Saddler, M Curtis Napier and Chris Gianelloni.