Edit: "Updating to the legacy 580xx drivers doesn't show me a desktop anymore", just in case someone else can stumble upon this by searching something similar.
Thanks to @deadcade@lemmy.deadca.de and @Ooops@feddit.org I did try fixing it out of curiosity. I had forgotten to install linux-headers. Hopefully someone who actually has the same problem as me, and needs to fix it, can use the tips given in the comments. On my end, I just had to install linux-headers and one reboot later it worked.
Always check if you have all needed packages and don't just "remember" that you had them installed.
Did you also uninstall all of the components of the new driver as per the arch site?
https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-support-main-packages-switch-to-open-kernel-modules/
Otherwise it's investigate from the tty as to what driver, if any is in use for the gpu pci device.
That isn't neccessary.
nvidia-openautomatically replaced nvidia (same fornvidia-open-dkms,nvidia-open-utilsetc) when 590 hit and installing any of those nvidia-580xx packages will ask to remove them because they conflict.Yessir. I did remove everything that was from the 590 driver before I installed everything from the legacy 580xx. I might have to load a kernel module somewhere, maybe. But the effort is not worth the payout. My data on the machine itself is not unrecoverable thankfully.
I have a 3080, so 590 is fine for me. But, I'm sure the legacy one is a dkms. But the process of installing that should be done as part of the install. E.g. you install, reboot
What does
lspci -kshow for the card in terms of Kernel driver in use, and kernel modules? Also what doesdkms statussay?If the module is installed and showing in dkms status and showing as used in lspci -k, it should be available for desktop environments.
I do agree in terms of effort when things go wrong though. I remember when I was a lot younger and I had no problems just sitting in front of my keyboard finding whatever the latest problem is. Now, I want to be doing things with my PC.
But, a bit of debugging might be worthwhile before doing a new installation.
I have never used Arch. And it may not be worthwhile for OP. But I am pretty confident that I could get that thing working again.
Booting into a rescue live-boot distro on USB, mount the Arch root somewhere, bind-mounting /sys, /proc, and /dev from the host onto the Arch root, and then chrooting to a bash on the Arch root and you're basically in the child Arch environment and should be able to do package management, have DKMS work, etc.
But, they shouldn't need rescue. The issue is no nvidia driver, but you can still login from the text terminals. Ctrl + Alt + F3, F4 etc etc. In fact when the window environment fails to load it should drop back to terminal.
Yeah, that's what I did. But it didn't drop to terminal because it was stuck on
/dev/sda2: clean. At first I thought it hadn't booted at all. Frankly I think that was simply the last thing my monitor got from the GPU before it simply gave up. So i had to switch to TTY manually. That is my best guess.That's weird. Whenever I've had gpu drivers fail the environment didn't come up and I would be left at a terminal.
Just for the record, Arch USB ISO has
arch-chrootcommand that does everything needed. So itβs quite easy to troubleshoot, when needed. Just mount what you need andarch-chrootthere.Arch live ISO gives you
arch-chrootwhich does all the binds automatically