Nvidia Driver Knowledge For Linux

Terms

PRIME render offload

PRIME render offload is the ability to have an X screen rendered by one GPU, but choose certain applications within that X screen to be rendered on a different GPU.

DRM KMS

The full name of DRM KMS is direct rendering manager kernel mode setting.

The capabilities of this DRM driver depend on the Linux kernel version and configuration.

NVIDIA’s DRM KMS support is still considered experimental. It is disabled by default, but can be enabled on suitable kernels with the ‘modeset’ kernel module parameter. E.g.,

modprobe -r nvidia_drm ; modprobe nvidia_drm modeset=1

See https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/580.76.05/README/kms.html for more details.

Kernel mode setting (KMS) is a method for setting display resolution and depth in the kernel space rather than user space. See https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_mode_setting for more details.

DKMS

DKMS stands for “dynamic kernel module support”. It’s targeted at dynamically building kernel modules if corresponding modules are not detected. The DKMS variants are not tied to a specific kernel, as they recompile the NVIDIA kernel module for each kernel for which header files are installed.

FAQ

What are mkinitcpio, dracut and grubby?

mkinitcpio and dracut are generators for initramfs. And grubby is tool for tweaking grub configs in a robust way and automatically generating /boot/grub2/grub.cfg when new kernels are installed. For manually generating /boot/grub2/grub.cfg, use grub2-mkconfig. e.g. its typical usage is grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg.

See https://docs.redhat.com/en/documentation/red_hat_enterprise_linux/7/html/system_administrators_guide/ch-working_with_the_grub_2_boot_loader.