(I posted this on the user forums first, but was told to ask here)
Card: GTX 1060 6GB (Palit)
Screen: Philips PHL BDM4350 (43" 3840x2160)
Connection: HDMI 2.0
I use the PPA ‘graphics-drivers’ on Ubuntu 16.04 (HWE kernel 4.13). I now tried to update the driver from 390.48 to 396.24.
The system boots, boot screen is visible, but as soon as it is about to switch to native resolution (I guess that’s when the driver is loaded?), the screen looks like this: Imgur: The magic of the Internet
Switching to another TTY doesn’t work either, the system is unresponsive.
I reset, boot in recovery mode, revert to 390.48, and it works fine again. Tried again with 396.24, same result. Reverted to 390.48, works again. Seems 100% reproducible.
I installed a fresh Ubuntu 18.04 (kernel 4.15) to another disk, added the PPA, and it’s the same result: 390 works, 396 doesn’t.
I switched my screen from HDMI 2.0 to 1.4. Works with 390 (at 30hz), doesn’t at all with 396.
I connected the screen via DisplayPort. Works with 390, doesn’t with 396.
I attached an older Dell Screen (24" 1920x1200) and tried again. The result is the same: It works fine with 390, and does not with 396 (except the screen stays black on the Dell instead of a broken image like on the Philips).
I checked the system messages of both boot processes, and all NVIDIA related messages are pretty much the same for the 390 boot and the 396 boot. The only difference is this line, which only is written on the (successful) 390 boot:
kernel: [ 10.074970] nvidia-modeset: Allocated GPU:0 (GPU-f30f79cc-0755-2581-03e0-284d0007b39a) @ PCI:0000:01:00.0
So I seem to have eliminated as a problem source:
- the screen (tried 2 completely different screens)
- the connection (tried both HDMI and DisplayPort, and DVI on the Dell)
- the operating system (tried on Ubuntu 16.04, as well as on a clean 18.04)
What’s left? Maybe mainboard? Firmware is up to date. What’s different between 390 and 396? Does the new driver use new features that require special BIOS/UEFI settings? (It’s an ASRock Z370 Extreme 4 with an Intel i5 8400 CPU)
Any ideas?
Update: I did a manual install of the 396.24 driver downloaded from the NVIDIA site, with the same results. So it seems not to be the PPA driver either.
