Attempting to use Monado or SteamVR on the older proprietary modules that are compatible with 10 series cards and lower looks to be entirely nonfunctional.
On X11 a lease can be attempted and the display connector appears ready for it but it fails for ‘unknown’ reasons:
Aug 04 22:42:22 msi monado-service[24533]: INFO [comp_target_swapchain_override_extents] Target 'direct' overrides compositor extents with (2880x1600) was (0x0 false)
Aug 04 22:42:22 msi monado-service[24533]: DEBUG [compositor_try_window] Target backend direct initialized!
Aug 04 22:42:22 msi monado-service[24533]: DEBUG [comp_window_direct_nvidia_init_swapchain] Will use display: Valve Corporation Index HMD (DP-0)
Aug 04 22:42:22 msi monado-service[24533]: ERROR [comp_window_direct_acquire_xlib_display] vkAcquireXlibDisplayEXT: VK_ERROR_UNKNOWN (0x000055ee7152ad80)
Aug 04 22:42:22 msi monado-service[24533]: ERROR [compositor_init_swapchain] Window init_swapchain failed!
Aug 04 22:42:22 msi monado-service[24533]: ERROR [comp_main_create_system_compositor] Failed to init compositor 0x55ee71358dd0
Using XRT_COMPOSITOR_FORCE_VK_DISPLAY=1 to force a Vulkan display acquisition fails with completely bogus extents on both Wayland and X11 just the same.
Aug 04 22:50:11 msi monado-service[24715]: INFO [comp_target_swapchain_override_extents] Target 'VkDisplayKHR' overrides compositor extents with (4226624525x4080412994) was (0x0 false)
Using XRT_COMPOSITOR_FORCE_WAYLAND_DIRECT=1 on the Monado service to force wayland direct display lease protocol for Monado results in the driver reporting no usable connectors at all
Aug 04 22:52:50 msi monado-service[25832]: INFO [comp_window_direct_wayland_init] No connector was chosen, will use first available connector
Aug 04 22:52:50 msi monado-service[25832]: INFO [_drm_lease_device_drm_fd] Available DRM lease device: /dev/dri/card1
Aug 04 22:52:50 msi monado-service[25832]: INFO [comp_window_direct_wayland_init] Found no connectors available for direct mode
Aug 04 22:52:50 msi monado-service[25832]: ERROR [compositor_init_window_pre_vulkan] Failed to init Wayland Direct-Mode backend!
Aug 04 22:52:50 msi monado-service[25832]: ERROR [comp_main_create_system_compositor] Failed to init compositor 0x55a22f5fc040
It appears there’s a bug where any use of the older fully proprietary kernel module results in total failure to acquire any drm lease. This does not appear to be limited to any specific hardware as some other user testing has proven this reproducible on any card if the proprietary (not open) modules are installed.
Please be wary when reproducing there is a bug on the valve index headsets across all vendors and drivers where the headset must be power cycled to properly appear as a display but barring that, this bug persists here in these proprietary kernel modules and may be easily reproduced.
Simply pull Monado and test for yourself and note how everything on the proprietary kernel modules are affected.
If when testing wayland with XRT_COMPOSITOR_FORCE_WAYLAND_DIRECT and Monado reports no wayland_direct, ensure you do a fresh Monado cmake config with the system package wayland-protocols or wayland-protocols-dev/ wayland-protocols-devel installed as this is required by Monado’s build or it may silently fail to access the lease protocol and frustrate efforts to reproduce.
This may be reproduced anywhere from 555 to 580 to my knowledge, it affects a very wide range of driver versions even older than this I could see in a few very older user reports I will have to dig up.
I have verified that the laptop connector is directly wired to the Nvidia card in this laptop and is not influencing anything you see here. We have also verified that single GPU systems reproduce this behavior, failing to acquire a drm lease on the proprietary kernel modules. This appears to have been broken for some time, parsing very old user reports and was mostly buried by people adopting the open modules, which do work.
This must be some sort of a regression but I do not known how far back this runs, it appears to be quite deep and perhaps as old as the nvidia-open modules themselves now…
[bones@msi ~]$ nvidia-smi
Mon Aug 4 23:02:53 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 580.65.06 Driver Version: 580.65.06 CUDA Version: 13.0 |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 Off | N/A |
| N/A 44C P8 4W / 125W | 7MiB / 8192MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 24868 G /usr/lib/Xorg 4MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
[bones@msi ~]$ inxi
CPU: quad core Intel Core i7-7700HQ (-MT MCP-) speed/min/max: 900/800/3800 MHz
Kernel: 6.15.9-arch1-1 x86_64 Up: 1h 4m Mem: 2.13/11.57 GiB (18.4%)
Storage: 350.27 GiB (6.0% used) Procs: 243 Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.38