Yet another black screen on TTY with nvidia drivers

Question

Hi everyone,
I've just changed my hardware and immediately installed a fresh Arch on it. Everything was fine until I installed the nvidia drivers: from that moment, once the boot is complete I get a normal (and working) GDM login screen, but I cannot switch to TTY with Ctrl+Alt+Fn. If I do, the screen goes black, but even worse, the monitor goes into sleep mode and I cannot get back to X (with Ctrl+Alt+F1).
The machine is still working correctly though, as I can get access to it via SSH. The only problem is that I cannot use the virtual consoles unless I want to lose all X display until the next reboot (restarting it via systemctl restart gdm doesn't work).
I also tried lightdm as a replacement but it's still the same.
However, when using the nouveau driver, everything works as expected and I can switch from one TTY to another as much as I want. Of course, I'd like to keep the nvidia driver for various reasons.
I found a lot of similar issues on the web and on this forum but none had this "additional little annoying thing" which is the sleep mode that can't be reverted but with a reboot.
Any help will be appreciated. Thanks in advance.
My specs:
- MSI GeForce GTX760
- Intel i7-4771
- Gigabyte Z87-D3HP
- Boot UEFI
Last edited by nanawel (2014-03-24 14:54:03)

Answer 1

I found that at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UEFI
Set up the BIOS in EFI or Legacy mode
Some recent computers (>2011) allow to set up the boot either in UEFI mode or in Legacy (not-EFI) mode. The way to carry out this setting depends on the computers, but generally this setting is located in the "Boot order" tab of the BIOS (to access the BIOS screens, it is generally necessary to press a key during the PC startup).
Note: Some BIOSes (e.g. American Megatrends' "Aptio", found on the Asus vivobook series) call Legacy mode "Compatibility Support Module" or simply "CSM".
So if that applies to your machine, you might be able to boot Windows7 with UEFI mode and Arch+Nvidia with Legacy BIOS mode, without changing anything to the installation (the BIOS boot loader seems to be compatible wih GPT partition table, but there is to configure something for it to work see https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/GPT#BIOS_systems).
If you can't do that and you really do not want to use the nouveau driver, you have no other choice than to wait for Nvidia to release an UEFI compatible driver, and not to work in tty console mode.
You can also try to search how some has succeeded to use the efifb frame buffer with the nvidia driver, with special configurations.
But, apart from the BIOS switch between boot loaders,  the two easiest approaches for you are either to use the nouveau driver or to not work in tty console mode when using the nvidia driver.
Maybe you could find something better but it will be more complicated, I don't know if you have time and motivation to go this way...
Nvidia will surely release a UEFI compatible driver sooner or later...
Regards.
Last edited by berbae (2014-03-26 14:42:01)