Nvidia-smi not working with Ubuntu 20.04 dual boot

[bartandrews123]

Following the steps in the solution to this helpful post: Nvidia-smi not working on dual-booted Ubuntu 20.04

I have successfully installed the nvidia driver 535, as confirmed by the output of dkms status, which is

nvidia, 535.183.01, 5.15.0-119-generic, x86_64: installed

However, even after a reboot, the output of nvidia-smi is

NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

For details, my bug report is attached. Does anyone know why my nvidia driver is not working?

I am running a Win 10 / Ubuntu 20.04 dual boot on a Dell Precision 5550 laptop. I have had this problem for about 3 years now, and so I would really like to get to the bottom of it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!!!

nvidia-bug-report.log.gz (157.9 KB)

[MarkusHoHo]

Hi there @bartandrews123 and welcome to the NVIDIA developer forums.

Is it possible that you tried blacklisting the nouveau driver and instead typed nvidia?

*** /proc/cmdline
*** ls: -r--r--r-- 1 root root 0 2024-09-10 15:58:15.484843686 +0200 /proc/cmdline
BOOT_IMAGE=/boot/vmlinuz-5.15.0-119-generic root=UUID=ffeda6a9-c783-4720-ac3b-540f3fa25e9a ro module_blacklist=nvidia

Check where that is set and try again.

Thanks!

[bartandrews123]

Thank you very much for your quick reply. This was indeed my issue. I commented out the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="module_blacklist=nvidia" line in my /etc/default/grub and rebooted and now it works. I still can’t believe it, thank you very much!

The reason that I blacklisted nvidia a couple of years ago (and subsequently forgot), is because I was having freezing on boot issues with ALL (even proprietary) nvidia drivers back then (see https://itsfoss.com/fix-ubuntu-freezing/). However, I recently decided to have another attempt at fixing the problem, and I am glad that it works now with the 535 driver.