So I’ve got Mint 19.3 running (on a dedicated SSD) on my daily driver Windows 10 machine, which has a 2080ti and 3 1080tis. I use two of the GPUs for monitor outputs, and run 4 monitors and a drawing tablet. There is no problem with this configuration in Windows. I use the GPUs for blender renders mainly, but I know Linux tends to run better with blender, so I’m trying to get it running for that purpose, to cut down render and maybe even fluid sim times (which are CPU)
But, installing Mint, and the open source default driver showed me the 3 monitors that are plugged into the 2080ti. The other monitor and tablet, which are plugged into one of the 1080tis. When I updated to the NVidia driver and rebooted, only the main monitor worked, and it was trying to tell me that it was a 1080ti. And it would only show in 1080p. (It’s a 4k monitor)
Is there a way to make this work? I will not be changing GPUs, or even taking them out. (They’re all water cooled, it’s a pain in the rear) There is nothing wrong with the hardware, it works flawlessly on Windows.
Nvidia’s Linux drivers just not developed enough?
It requires custom Xorg startup scripts that overrides the default Xorg boot process which is beyond 99.99% of Linux newcomer’s skill levels.
Nvidia have NOT made it easy. The only way to get all 5 screens running off 1 Xscreen is to only use 1 GPU.
I guarantee you, it’s beyond your skill level.
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Is there a way for me to tell Linux to use a particular GPU? I’ve tried booting in with just the main GPU plugged into monitors, I just unplugged anything not plugged into the first GPU, but it still recognizes the wrong GPU.
I’ve already done the latest driver install and reboot. You can see it has decided, arbitrarily I suppose, to use one of the 1080ti’s, instead of the 2080ti the monitors are plugged in to.
Side note, if I launch blender, it doesn’t recognize any GPUs under CUDA.
Another screenshot:
I don’t really care if I need to unplug a monitor or three to get this to work, but I will need all 4 GPUs to function for rendering, otherwise I can’t leverage any of the benefits Linux brings for render times.
Edit: I’ve also tried booting in with just one monitor plugged in, but since only one monitor was working in the first place, I’m not surprised that didn’t make a difference, but it was worth a shot.
I’m still stuck on this problem. I tried following the guide here:
But at the end of the day, I have all the same problems. I’m booting in with just 1 monitor connected to the main GPU (2080ti), but I keep getting borkage.
Output of lsmod | grep nvidia
Output of glxinfo | grep OpenGL
VMware? I installed this bare metal, I’m not using a VM, is this normal?
Drivers are installed…
~$ glxinfo | grep -i vendor
But Mint has decided not to use them? Am I interpereting that right?
Note: Was reading around some more and ran across a potential issue with secure boot and signed keys, so I checked it out in BIOS, and I’ve had secure boot disabled the whole time, so that rules that out.
Is CUDA installed? The Nvidia driver is generally packaged separately from the CUDA libraries.
Got it worked out. It was loading the fbdev fallback driver, even though the Nvidia drivers were installed. So I just removed it, and it’s all working fine now. I have 4 monitors running off 1 GPU (3 and a tablet), I have 4k, I have UI scaling, I have CUDA rendering for all GPUs (And noted a 13.9% uplift in render speed over Windows)
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