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Symptoms: The system started to become critically slow, and there are visible clues that the problem lies in the graphics processing, as other processor-heavy tasks take almost the same time as they did before. And mouse clicks, new window rendering, and graphics processing in general are painfully slow.

Spec: NVIDIA GeForce MX330 on an MSI Modern 15 A10RAS laptop running Ubuntu 24.04.2 with Linux kernel ver 6.11.0-25-generic. NVIDIA Linux-535 proprietary drivers are selected for running in the additional drivers.

Secondary problem: After a couple of updates and reboots, trying to fix this issue, network and other connectivity tools also disappeared.

Tried fixes: As described in this askubuntu answer, I edited the grub file at /etc/default/grub and added i915.tuxedo_disable_psr2=1 i915.enable_psr=0 to GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= quiet splash after a space.

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT= quiet splash i915.tuxedo_disable_psr2=1 i915.enable_psr=0

This relieved the problem to some extent in some cases, but has not completely fixed it.

Nipuna
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1 Answers1

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After much digging around for days, this is what I've come to understand and how I fixed my problem. Seems to be a common problem with NVIDIA drivers combined with Linux kernel updates.

Reason: NVIDIA Linux drivers have 3 main branches: 535, 550 and 570. The first one, 535, is the most stable one but might be slow to get the latest updates. While 550 can be considered as the new features branch while the 570 can be considered as the dev/latest branch.

So what happened was that when Ubuntu got the latest kernel update 6.11.0-25-generic, NVIDIA-535 didn't have the update to support the latest kernel, hence the problem.

Suggested Fixes:

You can take two paths for a fix.

  1. Switch to an old kernel version that works and stay with it until NVIDIA Linux-535 gets support for the latest kernel version.

  2. Switch to 550 or 570 drivers for immediate support for the latest kernel version, which NVIDIA usually provides on 550 and 570 channels.

What I actually did

I opted to wait until 535 gets the support for my kernel version and did the following,

1. Check if I've got an old kernel

That still works with the existing drivers. To list the old kernels available,

sudo grub-mkconfig | grep -iE "menuentry 'Ubuntu, with Linux" | awk '{print i++ " : "$1, $2, $3, $4, $5, $6, $7}'

Then restart with one of them to see if it works. Usually the one before the latest one works. Boot with one from the grub splash menu.

Bonus: If you have trouble getting to the the menu, change the following on /etc/defaults/grub

GRUB_TIMEOUT_STYLE=menu
GRUB_TIMEOUT=10

Bonus2: If you want to boot with the old kernel automatically,

Find the line with GRUB_DEFAULT and change its content to GRUB_DEFAULT="1>2". Note the quotation mark. Here, "1>2" means the grub will by default enter entry #1 in the first menu (Advanced Options) and then entry #2 in the 2nd menu (which points to #2 in the kernel list shown above).

Save and exit the file. Then, to apply the config file, run sudo update-grub before rebooting.

2. Full update the system

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

3. Manually installing NVIDIA 535 drivers

In case the 535 drivers that are already installed had an issue or have new updates with them.

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-535

4. Reinstall the latest kernel

sudo apt install --reinstall linux-generic

5. Install the extra modules for the latest kernel

To get the network and other extras back

sudo apt install linux-modules-extra-6.11.0-25-generic

Change the kernel version accordingly (6.11.0-25-generic in my case)

Bonus: A better way to verify the problem

nvidia-smi

lsmod | grep nvidia

If nvidia-smi errors or lsmod don't show NVIDIA modules, then the GPU driver is not working correctly with the current kernel, which is exactly what happened in my case.

Nipuna
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