nvidia-340 crashes display in 18.04 Bionic when no Nvidia GPU present

[Duncan Greatwood]

Upgrading to 18.04 (Bionic) desktop on a machine running 17.10 (Artful) and originally installed with Xenial 16.04. Previous release (and other) upgrades had gone without issue.

Run the installer, upgrades to 18.04, and reboots.

Instead of returning to graphical Ubuntu login prompt, booting starts but gets stuck in a state where the screen is flashing every few seconds between light grey and black.

After various experimentation, discovered that the graphical login prompt would return as wanted if I did:
    sudo apt-get remove nvidia-340

Note - the machine has Intel graphics, HD Graphics 630 (rev 04).

Why was nvidia-340 ever installed? I believe I setup this machine by exporting a package list from another machine that DID have nvidia graphics and then importing it (via synaptics package manager) to the machine in question.

I believe that nvidia drivers have been installed for all the earlier Ubuntu releases, but only in 18.04 did they cause an issue.

I tested this theory on another machine with Intel graphics running 18.04, and sure enough installing nvidia-340 broke the graphical login prompt on reboot - and removing nvidia-340 fixed it again.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.04
Package: nvidia-340 (not installed)
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.15.0-22.24-generic 4.15.17
Uname: Linux 4.15.0-22-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.9-0ubuntu7.2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sat Jun 9 18:47:58 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-06-30 (345 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" - Release amd64 (20170412)
SourcePackage: nvidia-graphics-drivers-340
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to bionic on 2018-05-31 (10 days ago)

[JeanLuke (james-jasa)]

I have the same issue, but I do have a GeForce 8200 integral on the motherboard. I was happily running 16.04 with nvidia-304 driver. Upgraded to 18.04 and nvidia-340 (recommended driver) and the system hangs a few minutes after booting. If I go into recovery mode and remove nvidia-340, all good.

[Keith Elliston (keithelliston2)]

I have a similar issue. Installed Ubuntu 18.04 on a Ryzen 7 2700x with an old Geforce 8600 GTS. Using the built-in drivers, the video card stalls (took me a long time to figure out it was the video card, after going through all the Ryzen issues). I installed the nvidia-340 as recommended, and the system hangs on boot before the graphic login. I removed the nvidia drivers, and reinstall the default, and it works again, but stalls. I know this is the video stalling, as I can ssh into the machine, and all is working fine on the computer, just the video on the hardware is stalling.