Linux + Nvidia driver + dock station + external monitors

In all details explained here.
https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/forums/gaming-rigs/8/377545/nvidia-card-dock-station/

Briefly:
HP OMEN with GTX 1060
Dell dock station WD19

External monitors works fine without any video drivers (only mesa)
External monitors are visible in nvidia-settings/xrandr and remain black if activated in any way (button in nvidia settings or direct xrandr --output DP-3.1 --right-of eDP-1)

If I connect those monitors directly to a laptop they work fine with nvidia drivers. (Tommorow (18 june Moscow) I will talk to dell tech support and try to find what is different.

|        | dock  | no dock |
|--------|-------|---------|
| raw    | OK    | OK      |
| nvidia | BLACK | OK      |
|        |       |         |

Xorg.log (32.7 KB)

A wild guess: some notebooks simply don’t support driving two monitors over USB-C, does a single monitor connected to the dock work?

no,
Still does not work.
I’ve mentioned a weird thing: Monitors do not display that they are going to sleep when they are plugged into the dock station.

Are you using the Thunderbolt or the USB Type-C variant?
Have you installed the most recent firmware (as there’s a specific fix in there)?:

Fixes:

  • Addressed rare video/display issues related to isolated combinations of host PCs, discrete GPUs and monitors.

https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=p20vd&oscode=wt64a&productcode=dell-wd19-130w-dock

The default Dell WD19 is not a Thunderbolt Docking Station, so this docking station does not use PCI-E pass-through to your graphics card, but requires a USB Type-C monitor driver or similar instead.

This driver in Linux could be: typec_displayport or the displaylink driver (DisplayLink is a provider, which is used by a lot of vendors for their Docking Stations) and you might need: x11-drivers/xf86-video-fbdev or x11-drivers/xf86-video-displaylink.

I also suspected this could be a Displaylink device but the xorg.log shows both monitors directly connected to the nvidia gpu. So a firmware update might be something to consider first.

It is fresh Arch Linux installation
pacman -Syyu (full update) does nothing

A firmware update of the Dell dock, the link @nvaert1986 gave, not a system update.

updated dock firmware,
DisplayLink does not show in xrandr

Nothing changes

====
I am wondering
will it help if I use WD19TB station?
e.g. which protocol is wider USB Type-C or thunderbolt
will Type-C laptop still be able to connect?

Please run nvidia-bug-report.sh as root and attach the resulting nvidia-bug-report.log.gz file to your post. You will have to rename the file ending to something else since the forum software doesn’t accept .gz files (nifty!).

nvidia-bug-report.log.definetly_not_gz.txt (223.6 KB)
Here

That doesn’t look like you had the dock connected while creating the log. Furthermore, you didn’t have lsusb installed.

nvidia-bug-report.log.definetly_not_gz.txt (322.7 KB)
managed to get back to it. (exam and preparation)

All dock devices properly detected and added, monitors detected but not added, weird. Looks like some incompatibility of the HP notebook.
If you find the time, you could create an xorg.conf and set
Option “ModeDebug” “true”
in the device section to maybe get some more info though chances are low.

I realised that resolution is increasing when I install nvidia drivers:
no drivers

screen #0:
  dimensions:    1920x1080 pixels (341x190 millimeters)
  resolution:    96x96 dots per inch

with drivers (this one is correct according to real display dimentions/diagonal)

screen #0:
  dimensions:    1920x1080 pixels (341x190 millimeters)
  resolution:    143x144 dots per inch

Can this problem be related?

Now the logs:
xorg config

 cat /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf
Section "OutputClass"
    Identifier "nvidia"
    MatchDriver "nvidia-drm"
    Driver "nvidia"
    Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"
    Option "ModeDebug" "true"
    ModulePath "/usr/lib/nvidia/xorg"
    ModulePath "/usr/lib/xorg/modules"
EndSection

nvidia-monitors-disabled-in-settings.log.txt (342.7 KB) nvidia-monitors-enabled-in-settings.log.txt (393.1 KB)
And a log from without driver (I have no idea if it will help) with displays working
no-nvidia.log.txt (78.6 KB)

Any progress on this issue? I’m experiencing the same problem with the WD19 docking station with NVIDIA GPU Quadro M2000M. My logs below.
nvidia-bug-report.log (1.2 MB)

I noticed that I was running 435 rather than 440. I’ve upgraded to 440, and the problem persists. I’ve also included the logs from the Nouveau drivers (which does properly display to the external monitor through the WD19 dock).
nvidia-bug-report_nouveau.log.gz (90.9 KB)
nvidia-bug-report_nvidia-driver-440.log.gz (305.2 KB)

no, still no progress.

Can someone from Nvidia support team log and track this bug?

This bug is being tracked internally as bug 3132826.

@kelvin.mba, @yarebenko:
Please specify Option “ModeDebug” “true”, as suggested in #13, and generate new logs after reproducing the issue.

What is the output of ‘xrandr --auto’ when the monitors are connected? The current logs show that the monitor are connected and have available modes, but no modes have been set.

Nothing returns with the xrandr command.

illusion@illusion-ThinkPad-P50:~/tmp$ xrandr --auto
illusion@illusion-ThinkPad-P50:~/tmp$ inxi -G
Graphics:  Device-1: Intel HD Graphics P530 driver: i915 v: kernel 
       Device-2: NVIDIA GM107GLM [Quadro M2000M] driver: nvidia v: 450.66 
       Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.8 driver: intel,nouveau resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
       OpenGL: renderer: Mesa Intel HD Graphics P530 (SKL GT2) v: 4.6 Mesa 20.0.8

Logs with ModeDebug set to True attached.
nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (486.7 KB)
xorg.conf.new.gz (1.0 KB)