Installation

This page adds some explanations to the guide created by Hannu Korvala.

Installing the driver packages

1. The installation might depend on your card. Find your nvidia card from this list.
2. Check what driver packages you need to install from the list below

Driver name	Base driver	OpenGL	OpenGL (multilib)
Maxwell (NV110) series and newer	nvidia	nvidia-utils	lib32-nvidia-utils
Kepler (NVE0) series	nvidia-470xx-dkms	nvidia-470xx-utils	lib32-nvidia-470xx-utils
GeForce 400/500/600 series cards [NVCx and NVDx]	nvidia-390xx	nvidia-390xx-utils	lib32-nvidia-390xx-utils

3. Install the correct packages. Something like:

sudo pacman -S nvidia nvidia-utils nvidia-settings

Note that nvidia-settings is not necessary but recommended. It is a graphical tool that can be used to tweak certain settings or move around the monitors in a multihead setup (graphically).

Enabling DRM kernel mode setting

Enabling DRM (Direct Rendering Manager) Kernel Mode setting enables the Direct Rendering Manager. This is a subsystem that exposes an API that user-space programs can use to send commands and data to the GPU and perform operations such as configuring the mode setting of the display.

1. Add the kernel parameter

• Go to your grub file with sudo vim /etc/default/grub
• Find GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT
• Append the line with nvidia-drm.modeset=1
• For example: GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet splash nvidia-drm.modeset=1"
• Save the file with CTRL+O
• Finish the grub config with sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

2. Add the early loading

• Go to your mkinitcpio configuration file with sudo nano /etc/mkinitcpio.conf
• Find MODULES=()
• Edit the line to match MODULES=(nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm)
• Save the file with CTRL+O
• Finish the mkinitcpio configuration with sudo mkinitcpio -P

mkinitcpio is a Bash script used to create an initial ramdisk environment. The script can fail if the boot partition is not big enough. A "not enough space error" can appear. It did happen to me and the solution consisted in resizing the partition with gparted.

Adding this modules to the mkinitcpio(8) configuration file will load them before anything else is done. As seen in the Arch Wiki, if this module (nvidia) is added to the initramfs, mkinicpio must be run every time there is a nvidia driver update. To automate this process a pacman hook can be added:

3. Adding the pacman hook

• Find the nvidia.hook in Hannu Korvala's repository or the Arch Wiki, make a local copy and open the file with your preferred editor.
• Find Target=nvidia
• Replace the nvidia with the base driver you installed, e.g. nvidia-470xx-dkms
• Save the file and move it to /etc/pacman.d/hooks/ , for example with sudo mv ./nvidia.hook /etc/pacman.d/hooks/