GTX 970 on Fedora 21

Alright, I have tried and tried and tried but I cannot get my 970 to work on any Linux distro. I mainly want it to work on Fedora. Now I've downloaded the most recent driver for Linux from nVidia's site. I make is executable then run it. First it complained I needed GCC installed, no problem, installed that, then it goes on that it needs the kernel source, alright, downloaded, then it complains about paths for the kernel. After that I'm completely and totally lost. I know some people were able to install the drivers and actually use them. Am I being stupid and missing something?

Never had this much trouble with a nVidia card on Linux before.

Did you try the OSS driver, Nouveau?

OSS? I'm unsure what that means. I did not try anything called Nouveau.

Fedora should default to it upon install. YOU WILL TAKE A SLIGHT HIT IN PERFORMANCE. The easiest way to enable it is to uninstall the propriety driver that us causing you issues. I highly   advise you to stay up to date with the projects development as it will/doesn't always support the latest kernel. As for OSS, it means open source software.

AMD cards take a 'slight' performance hit when jumping from proprietary to oss drivers.

Nvidia cards take a 'major' hit. That's why proprietary drivers are recommended for the green team.

See if this guide helps: http://rpmfusion.org/Howto/nVidia

+1

Install nVidia proprietary drivers from rpmfusion.

nVidia has a deal with RedHat, in that they paid RedHat for miscellaneous work. RedHat makes Fedora make it pretty easy to work with nVidia proprietary drivers. Nouveau will just not work anywhere near as it should on any hardware after 2012, and has piss poor performance, so if you're an nVidia victim, you have no choice but to use the proprietary drivers.

You have to think of this though, because it means that SELinux is pretty much completely put out of commission, otherwise the nVidia binary blobs you have to first infect your kernel with, can't work, and the driver itself can't work. At that point, what's the use in using Fedora? At that point, you're only making things hard on yourself, because Fedora is not the most stable and comfortable RPM distro out there, nor does Fedora have all the latest and greatest packages, and you pretty much have to constantly get packages from the SuSE repos anyway to have a relatively decent working system, because of the poor state of the Fedora repos. If you're a gamer, forget Fedora altogether. The Steam client doesn't work well with SELinux, most games don't work well with SELinux, and RedHat makes Fedora pretty much sabotage AMD graphics, so that there are just a ton of hurdles to jump before being able to use Fedora for gaming.

The fact that you don't know what nouveau is, means that you don't want to use Fedora for development and other stuff it's really made for. If you want to use an RPM-distro (which is still a very good choice), just go for OpenSuSE, it is a 1000 times more manageable and usable than Fedora, really!

The reason for all of this is because RedHat took control of Fedora some two years ago. Commercial big corporation interests and open source communities don't mesh, and that's why things haven't been meshing at Fedora in the last two years. Things have also not been meshing at RedHat by the way, ever since they overtook Microsoft in terms of stock price some 4 years ago or so, they have been catching the evil Microsoft management bug...

+1 to OpenSuSE I'm running it on my laptop and it's a real joy to use, especially when you want to use KDE.

@OP

Installing proprietary drivers by hand is always a very unpleasant experience.

OpenSuSE make this process much easier with one-click install see here

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_drivers

But if you really want to here's TheHardWay(TM)

https://en.opensuse.org/SDB:NVIDIA_the_hard_way

Generally speaking if you want the smoothest and most integrated experience go with opensource Intel or AMD drivers. You lose out on some minor performance and some OpenGL features at the time (3.3 current 4.0-4.2 should be implemented this year) but no tearing, no compilation of funny kernel modules, etc.

AMD are even switching their Linux effort completely over to the opensource driver.

Cheers!

 

Thanks for the help everyone I'll mess with this when I get home and hopefully get it to work. Main reason I went Team Green was because they had the newest cards out of that time and I really needed an upgrade. Next time I might go Team Red.

After the deal between RedHat and nVidia, Fedora went from "the next Fedora that comes out will be the first HSA focused distro ever with full utilization of AMD's OpenCL features" to "we've orphaned the AMD drivers in our community repositories, because we don't have any more time to make sure the kernel modules for Catalyst are maintained for the kernels we upgrade to", even though there are far less troubles with AMD modules than with nVidia modules lolz...

As soon as this happened, I knew I had to go find another distro than RHEL to run my company on, and SLES was already on the main server, and SLES and OpenSuSE is now on everything. When I compare the packages between OpenSuSE and Fedora, it's sad to see that Fedora is pretty far behind in offering up-to-date packages on its repos, and that now over two months after the release of Fc21, it's still riddled with bugs. What's the use in installing Fedora if you have to get all your packages from the SuSE Build Service and SuSE repos anyway. If you're not invested in the Fedora/RHEL system, and don't have to work on Atomic servers, Docker, Sandstorm, or Chromium cloud-focused virtualization technologies, I wouldn't use Fedora. Fedora has become a very specific distro, for a specific category of users in the business. I wouldn't consider it a "general mainstream distro" any more. OpenSuSE has more than filled in the space Fedora left by shrinking though.

If you're going to use OpenSuSE, ignore the warning on the OpenSuSE website about the use of Tumbleweed if you're on AMD graphics: the Tumbleweed Catalyst packages are actually maintained better than the Stable release ones (if those are even available). If you're on nVidia or Intel though, stick with the Stable release if you want to play games.

It's complicated, I know, but it has always been like that. It's because of commercial interests and the corruption that comes with it. AMD is about to completely solve that, with kernel 3.19 and the AMDGPU driver, a proprietary driver that doesn't require binary blobs. This is the only way AMD can counter all of the constant sabotage they're encountering in linux because their drivers, either proprietary or open source, are maintained badly, neglected, orphaned, or directly voluntarily bugged, because the kernel modules are open source and part of the linux kernel, and the userspace driver is proprietary: this combination ensures compatibility, even with the newest kernels, and takes away any excuse dishonest maintainers could have, and at the same time takes away the possibility to mess with the userspace component of the driver.

I would also say, go with AMD, they're the good guys doing Linux the right way.

AMD is about to completely solve that, with kernel 3.19 and the AMDGPU driver, a proprietary driver that doesn't require binary blobs.

What you mean is AMDKFD (AMD Kernel Fusion Driver) responsible for OpenCL, hUMA and HSA.

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTg1MzE

 

AMDGPU is still in development but should be out soon (3.20 / 4.00 ish). AMD are unifying their drivers at the time. AMDGPU is the new kernel driver which is responsible for power management, fan control and providing the Direct Rendering Interface. It is responsible for the low level stuff which the actual graphics driver uses to speak to the card.

AMDs plan is to use AMDGPU  as a common base for Catalyst and the opensource drivers. Right now they cannot abandon Catalyst (their proprietary driver) completely as it still has more functionality (OpenGL 4.5 instead 3.3, flawless OpenCL, etc.) and their enterprise customers need those features. They would lose a lot of cash if they would just abandon Catalyst. Their long term plan though is to switch to a fully open stack. Catalyst on AMDGPU is just a stop gap until the opensource driver is up to par featurewise. Experience wise it is way ahead already.

To summarise:

Now: Two completely independent stacks (Catalyst+proprietary kernel driver and "radeon" kernel driver + mesa)

Soon: Two user space stacks running off a shared, opensource kernel driver (AMDGPU + Catalyst or mesa)

Long Term: Fully open stack (AMDGPU+mesa)

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTgwODA

 

Cheers!

Not to mention SUSE uses Zypper which all in all is awesome due to how simple things are. AppArmor is leagues ahead SELinux, Novell backs it, Tumbleweed is the most solid rolling release ever (speaking of which, the installer for 20150129 freezes at 87%), it comes with a hyper visor installer, and has the best KDE implementation of any other distro. Don't get me wrong, Fedora is great. It's just their direction has went from being open, to prioritizing companies that pay Red Hat... Sponsorship is their bane. SUSE has source based repositories so if you want a semi optimized Linux distribution without the hassle (not really a hassle other than time consumption) then you can have it. I highly recommend SUSE for enthusiasts to new users. Why? It just works (the way YOU need it to).

Tbh, I haven't used Catalyst in a while. I get very acceptable fps (always more than my 60 fps monitor can show, what more could I need) in all my linux games through radeonsi, I don't see the need to use Catalyst.

I'm quite sure that this will be the case for most AMD GP-GPU using gamers.

Thing is, a lot of people use older distros, not bleeding edge, and they often get either not so good fps on radeonsi, or - something I've come across quite often - no gameplay whatsoever on steam games, because the old version of radeonsi and the old kernel they're on, doesn't have certain features that the steam client has to detect in order to play games.

This is even the fact on OpenSuSE 13.2 I believe. However, AMD GPU owners can easily run Tumbleweed, and that is absolutely trouble-free. I actually find it better than 13.2. Nvidia owners can't really use Tumbleweed if they want to game, because they have to use the nvidia binaries, and they'll have to debug and compile every week or so in order to have a working system.

Nvidia owners should really stick to Ubuntu 12.04 LTS, the old LTS version, the only linux distro Valve supports, and use whatever proprietary drivers are available there.

Be careful with info from phoronix. Michael Larabel is not the most stable person on earth, and he thoroughly hates AMD and leaves no stone unthrown in the direction of AMD. Phoronix used to be a pretty decent linux news site until 2012 or so, but then it kinda got unsorted in many ways lolz...

 

For those that are interested in seeing the reality of gaming hardware, and seeing that it isn't like YouTube marketing suggests, I'd recommend taking a look at the Valve survey results.

You'll see that about 75% of all gamers are on Intel CPU's, and about 25% on AMD CPU's. However, take a look at the CPU speed charts. You'll see that the majority of the gamers is using a dual core processor, and that quad core adoption (yes, that's still a thing lolz) is pretty stagnant. You'll also see that a large part of AMD users are on CPU speeds of more than 3.7 GHz, which pretty much means that they are overclocking, and are using 4 or more core CPU's. On the Intel side however, the number of users with a clock speed of over 3.7 GHz is very very small (like 1 %), which means that the number of gamers that actually use the high end gaming hardware by Intel, is very very small. You'll also see that of the linux users, the number of high end AMD CPU users is actually proportionally higher, even though there are proportionally even more Intel CPU users there. Both on Windows and linux, the most popular graphics card used by gamers is the Intel HD4000 iGPU.

What does that mean?

It means that there is a lot of marketing targeted at a very very very small section of gamers that even use the hardware that is plugged the most on YouTube and other marketing channels.

It means that most gamers use PC hardware that is actually inferior in terms of gaming spec to hardware consoles like the XBone and the PS4.

It means that there are proportionally more enthusiasts that want to get the most out of their systems on AMD, and proportionally more enthusiasts on linux.

It means that a lot of discussions of how poor AMD's FX 6/8k series performance is for gaming, are completely wasted time and energy, because most gamers use Intel parts that are inferior to those AMD parts in terms of gaming performance and in terms of overall performance.

And there are a lot more conclusions one can draw from the Valve Survey results lolz...

In the end, the bottom line is that everyone can relax about gaming hardware, has time enough to weigh all options for the future, doesn't have to decide anything, can use the hardware they have to make the most out of learning how to work with linux, thus expanding their options for the future even further.

How many videos are paid for and made to promote high end i7 CPU's on high end Z and X mobos, showing off SLI setups and stuff like that? How much does this cost in total marketing budget? And then... how little gaming customers actually buy that stuff? The really brutal truth is, that those that buy all this "high end" stuff, are paying premium for all of that senseless marketing...

@Nomoran,

Use Archlinux - you won't have any Nvidia issues.

Only if he freezes the kernel until nvidia updates their driver.

General rule:

On opensource drivers: Be on the bleeding edge to get the most out of your hardware

On proprietary drivers: Choose a stable, non-changing distro to have a compatible kernel

Alright, I attempted the "One Click Install" Installed without a hitch, then I rebooted the machine. Now it loads up to the "boot screen" hangs there. If I press an arrow key I get one of two things. Either A. count down of 2:59 where it attempts to load the driver and fails. B. a loop of text going by so fast I can read but bits and pieces.

I'm going attempt the "hard" way of doing it this evening and see if that works.

Any tips/suggestions of what I might be doing wrong would be helpful. I've never had this much trouble with a display driver before.

Try adding 'nomodeset' to the kernel parameters. While in grub, edit a boot option by pressing 'e', then, to the line that contains quiet and splash and wahtnot.

"quiet splash nomodeset ..."

check your permissions, are you in the "video" group?

also try not only adding "nomodeset" like correctly suggested, but also "rd.blacklist=radeonsi".

Important question though: did you stick with 13.2 (which has no official catalyst package), or did you - like suggested before - first upgrade to Tumbleweed (which has the latest catalyst as official package).

You might also consider to not use catalyst (also like suggested before), because radeonsi, the open source KMS driver, will perform about 80% of catalyst, but will cause less overhead in general and will be super stable, while you can only expect Windows-like quality from the Windows driver that is Catalyst...

 

EDIT:

I just saw that you were using a GTX970, so scratch the above in your case, stay on 13.2, add "nomodeset rd.blacklist=nouveau" to your kernel parameters.

 

TIP:

you can always roll back to a previous working install by restoring the snapper image from before the one-click install (it is marked as such in the snapshot descriptions).

To roll back, select the second entry in GRUB, and you'll get the menu that brings you to the snapshot restore list.

Alright I rolled back and attempted the manual "hard way". That as well failed and had the same effect as the auto easy way. I also tried to manually install the driver again and the same effect. I'm honestly done with the driver now. I can't figure what in the world is going wrong. Might just wait for one of the AMD cards and see what they offer.

 

Thanks

I have OpenSuSE with nvidia drivers on a system though, even a Tumbleweed system in fact, and I don't recall there being a problem using the 1-click install.

What if you would install OpenSuSE 12.3 for instance, install the nVidia driver with the 1-click for 12.3, and then upgrade the whole thing to Tumbleweed by swapping the repos and doing a standard zypper dup. I have an idea that that might work because of some things that have changed since 13.2.