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Spaceman Spiff

Member

Registered: 2019-03-03

Posts: 30  

Nvidia persistence?

I installed the proprietary nvidia driver about a week ago.
After that, I keep getting this message when I install a new package in synaptic. Is it something or should I ignore it?

nvidia-persistenced failed to initialize. Check syslog for more details.
invoke-rc.d: initscript nvidia-persistenced, action "start" failed.
dpkg: error processing package nvidia-persistenced (--configure):
installed nvidia-persistenced package post-installation script subprocess returned error exit status 1
Errors were encountered while processing:
nvidia-persistenced

Altoid

Member

Registered: 2017-05-07

Posts: 1,429  

Re: Nvidia persistence?

Hello:

... installed the proprietary nvidia driver ...
... keep getting this message when I install a new package ...

Did you check out the thread I suggested?  ->  https://dev1galaxy.org/viewtopic.php?id=3820

See post #23, it has a step by step rendition of how I followed Hevy Devy's instructions and solved my problem.

Don't skip any steps.

Best,

A.

Ermiq

Member

Registered: 2022-02-06

Posts: 8  

Re: Nvidia persistence?

I would like to add some more details on the issue and suggest a slightly different solution.
Since the issue is caused by the nvidia-persistenced package alone, I believe that the workaround with --no-install-recommends is not an optimal one. User likely might want to get the other recommended packages for nvidia-driver to be installed. The nvidia-settings (GUI tool for NVidia driver settings) is one of the recommended ones, for example. Also, for Steam-Proton the nvidia-driver-libs:i386 is required, and it is also marked as recommended for nvidia-driver (assuming that the user have enabled i386 architecture before the driver installation). And the linux kernel headers along with nvidia DKMS package (both are required to build the driver module during the installation)) are also in the recommended.

So, instead of using --no-install-recommends I think the better option would be to just not install nvidia-persistenced alone, and we can do that with apt-mark. 

To prevent the installation of nvidia-persistenced and it's i386 version (if you have i386 packages enabled) do this:

$ sudo apt-mark hold nvidia-persistenced nvidia-persistenced:i386

After this you can just install the driver as usual. All the dependencies will be pulled and installed except the nvidia-persistenced.

In my case with Devuan Chemaera and 1050Ti all I need to do to install NVidia drivers and get them ready for Steam-Proton is:
1. Enable i386 packages for Steam and nvidia-driver-libs:i386 which is required by Steam:

$ sudo dpkg --add-architecture i386

$ sudo apt update

2. Put the problematic packages on hold:

$ sudo apt-mark hold nvidia-persistenced nvidia-persistenced:i386

2. Install the driver meta-package. It pulls all the other required packages like DKMS build tools, i386 libs, etc. recommended so they are getting installed automatically.

$ sudo apt install nvidia-driver

3. The last step is Steam:

$ sudo apt install steam

Probably in the case of the legacy 390 driver the steps for headers and DKMS were required. In case of current 460 driver everything is installed automatically thanks to the recommended packages auto installation process.