SDDM starts to black screen on hybrid laptops withe modern NVidia cards

[Darin Miller]

Hybrid laptop with an NVidia 960M video card boots to a black SDDM screen when the NVidia card enabled (using the NVidia 384 and 390.xx drivers). Nouveau drivers fail to boot.

Switching to Intel drivers (sudo prime-select intel), SDDM loads/runs just fine.

Removing the "quiet" option from grub boot shows Simple Display Manager starting without error when NVidia is enabled. Unsure how to provide additional useful information.

Ctrl-Alt-f1, logging in via the terminal, and startx enables normal desktop use.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: sddm 0.17.0-1ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-13.14-generic 4.15.10
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-13-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia_modeset nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: KDE
Date: Tue Apr 10 19:15:16 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2018-03-14 (27 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Kubuntu 18.04 LTS "Bionic Beaver" - Alpha amd64 (20180312)
SourcePackage: sddm
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Matheus (mattfly)]

I am affected by exactly the same problem, sddm is just a black screen and I have to switch to tty1 in order to start the Xorg session.
I am using nvidia-184 driver package and my gpu is a nvidia gtx 1050ti
I hope this get fixed on the lts released.

[Matheus (mattfly)]

Also I tried Removing the "quiet" option from grub boot but it does not display Simple Display Manager.

An interesting fact I just found is that if you simply type your password and hit enter it will login. So sddm is there running but just not being displayed

[Matheus (mattfly)]

Updating to kernel 4.16.1 solved the problem!

[Darin Miller (darinmiller)]

The 4.16.1 kernel did not fix it for me :(.

[Matheus (mattfly)]

Sorry it did not fix for me neither. I realized that Nvidia got disabled when I that kernel also, even after reinstalling the nvidia-384 while using that kernel does not enable it and I don't know how to use my gpu while using this kernel.

So we don't have a fix yet.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Tehnick (tehnick)]

In my Debian Sid systems on laptops with GeForce GTX 1050 Ti Mobile I use following workaround:

echo 'xrandr --setprovideroutputsource modesetting NVIDIA-0' | sudo tee -a /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup
echo 'xrandr --auto' | sudo tee -a /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup
cat /usr/share/sddm/scripts/Xsetup

The content of /etc/X11/xorg.conf is well described at https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers/Optimus

[Raveesh (raveeshn)]

Ran into this issue today on a fresh install of Ubuntu 18.04 on my desktop.

CPU: Intel i5 3330
Motherboard: Gigabyte H110N
GPU: nvidia 1050ti
Graphics version: 390.48