X won't start on CentOS 7.6 after installing NVIDIA driver for 2x RTX 2080 Ti from ELRepo

I’m having quite a difficult time getting the NVIDIA driver properly installed on CentOS 7.6. Upon reboot, X won’t start.

Hardware:

  • HP Z8 G4
  • 1x Intel Xeon Gold 6152
  • 2x RTX 2080 Ti
  • 48 GB DDR4 RAM

Steps to reproduce:

  1. Clean installation of CentOS 7.6 with only GNOME installed
  2. Install all software updates and reboot
  3. After reboot, kernel in use is 3.10.0-957.21.2.el7.x86_64
  4. Install kernel development headers: ``` $ sudo yum install "kernel-devel-uname-r == $(uname -r)" ```
  5. Install EPEL: ``` $ sudo yum install https://dl.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/epel-release-latest-7.noarch.rpm ```
  6. Install DKMS: ``` $ sudo yum install dkms ```
  7. Install ELRepo: ``` $ sudo rpm --import https://www.elrepo.org/RPM-GPG-KEY-elrepo.org $ sudo rpm -Uvh http://www.elrepo.org/elrepo-release-7.0-3.el7.elrepo.noarch.rpm ```
  8. Reboot
  9. Install NVIDIA driver from ELRepo: ``` $ sudo yum install kmod-nvidia.x86_64 ```

    This purportedly blacklists nouveau and installs 430.26, in particular, 430.26-1.el7_6.elrepo

  10. Reboot

Expected results:

  1. X and gdm start with the 430.26 driver perfectly installed

Actual results:

  1. Boot screen hangs
  2. Last message reads: ``` [ OK ] Started GNOME Display Manager....ices....shutdown.... ```

I will attach my nvidia-bug-report.log.gz file.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (1.61 MB)

The xserver gets started on the first nvidia gpu which doesn’t have a monitor attached so it stops.
Please add

BusID          "PCI:45:0:0"

to the device section of your xorg.conf to always start on the second gpu.

Perfect! Thank you so much! I would just add, as useful information for anyone else who might encounter this thread, that you can access this file on CentOS 7.6 by switching over to a virtual console and

# vim /etc/X11/xorg.conf

.