Nvidia-settings crashes, displays recognized as PRIME displays (Ubuntu 24.04, 550 and 560 drivers)

Graphics / Linux Linux
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1

We have a workstation driving in total 10 displays via 3 GPUs:

> nvidia-smi -L
GPU 0: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090  (4 displays)
GPU 1: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1650  (2 displays)
GPU 2: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090  (4 displays)

The CPU does not have an integrated GPU: AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 5955WX

The two “monitoring” displays are connected GPU 1 (GTX 1650) and they work fine.

When another display is connected to GPU0 (RTX 4090), it is recognized as a “PRIME” display in nvidia-settings (please check the screenshot).

When more displays are connected to GPU0, nvidia-settings crashes when I click on “X Server Display Configuration” with “core dump”. No other error messages are shown in the terminal.

The same happens with 550 and 560 drivers.

xrandr --listmonitors shows all connected displays.

Is there a way to prevent the displays from being recognized as PRIME?

Is there any way to prevent the nvidia-settings from crashing? We have quite complicated display configuration with multiple screens, and it is very difficult to create xorg.conf manually.

Further details:

NVIDIA-SMI 560.35.03              Driver Version: 560.35.03      CUDA Version: 12.6

Linux version 6.8.0-45-generic (buildd@lcy02-amd64-115) (x86_64-linux-gnu-gcc-13 (Ubuntu 13.2.0-23ubuntu4) 13.2.0, GNU ld (GNU Binutils for Ubuntu) 2.42) #45-Ubuntu SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Fri Aug 30 12:02:04 UTC 2024

Screenshot from 2024-10-14 16-25-06
Screenshot from 2024-10-14 16-25-061054×804 133 KB

1 Like
2

nvidia-settings showing “PRIME Monitor” in your setup is expected, a know limitation. Crashing when more monitors are attached should rather reported here: GitHub - NVIDIA/nvidia-settings: NVIDIA driver control panel
In general, nvidia-settings isn’t well suited for your task due to its limitations.

3

Thank you. I reposted the nvidia-settings crash issue on the github page.

Where can I find more information on the “PRIME Monitor” issue?

Should I assume that there is no alternative to nvidia-settings and we have to create xorg.conf manually?

We need to setup multiple XWindow screens with a specific order of the displays so it is difficult to get it right without nvidia-settings.

4

Some info to maybe make things a bit clearer:
nvidia-settings creates nvidia metamodes options in xorg.conf to specify monitor position/resolution. Those of course only work for nvidia gpus.
xorg.conf by itself doesn’t have any means to do the same.
PRIME is the kernel-drm facility to do multi-gpu graphics, initially for intel-nvidia combos named “Nvidia Optimus”. The PRIME displays always being the one on the intel gpu, not configurable by nvidia metamodes (obviously).
Since then, PRIME has been extended to all kinds of gpu combinations, including nvidia2nvidia. Unfortunately, nvidia-settings was never extended to cover that setup.
Alternatively, you could use applications like arandr, generate the xrandr commands, put those into a script to run from .xinitrc or the likes.

5

To follow on that. I manually created xorg.conf with a separate screen assigned to each GPU. After that, nvidia-settings did not crash, no monitors were detected as “Prime”, and I could finish the configuration. So it was an easy solution, but it took quite some time to resolve.

Your suggestion of using xrandr could also work. I manually created xorg.conf with the multiple screens for xrandr (I did not find an option in xrandr to create new screens), but once I noted nvidia-settings worked, it was not necessary to use xrandr.

Here is the link to the nvidia-settings GitHub issue: nvidia-settings crashes when more displays are corrected (Ubuntu 24.04, 550 and 560 drivers) · Issue #109 · NVIDIA/nvidia-settings · GitHub

The issue is still there, as nvidia-settings still crashes without such manual xorg.conf configuration.