After spending few days on how-tos and debugging the black screen issue on boot after insalling the nvidia drivers, I was finally able to find a solution to all my problems. The main reason I'm writing this post is to let you know that the tutorial found on Kali's official website is broken as of date 11 April 2018. According to he mentioned in their website you might be able to successfully install the packages - ocl-icd-libopencl1, nvidia-driver, nvidia-cuda-toolkit but you might encounter issues during the reboot. You might get a black screen and won't be able to login via the GUI.
First of all let me tell you the specifications of my system-
CPU - Intel® Core™ i5-8250U CPU @ 1.60GHz × 8
GPU #1- Intel® UHD Graphics 620
GPU #2- Nvidia GeForce MX150
root@europa:~# uname -a
Linux europa 4.14.0-kali3-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.14.17-1kali1 (2018-02-16) x86_64 GNU/Linuxroot@europa:~# cat /etc/*release*
DISTRIB_ID=Kali
DISTRIB_RELEASE=kali-rolling
DISTRIB_CODENAME=kali-rolling
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Kali GNU/Linux Rolling"
PRETTY_NAME="Kali GNU/Linux Rolling"
NAME="Kali GNU/Linux"
ID=kali
VERSION="2018.1"
VERSION_ID="2018.1"
ID_LIKE=debian
ANSI_COLOR="1;31"
HOME_URL="http://www.kali.org/"
SUPPORT_URL="http://forums.kali.org/"
BUG_REPORT_URL="http://bugs.kali.org/"Before we begin, a couple of notes:
USE AT YOUR OWN RISK
This tutorial is for official NVIDIA Driver
Tutorial found on official Kali website is BROKEN! It never works for optimus/hybrid Graphics enabled laptop
Step 1: Verify you have hybrid graphics
root@europa:~# lspci | grep -E "VGA|3D"
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation UHD Graphics 620 (rev 07)
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation GP108M [GeForce MX150] (rev a1)Step 2: Disable nouveau
echo -e "blacklist nouveau\noptions nouveau modeset=0\nalias nouveau off" > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
update-initramfs -u && rebootStep 3: System will reboot and nouveau should be disabled. Verify if nouveau is disabled:
lsmod |grep -i nouveauIf shows nothing,means nouveau successfully disabled.
Step 4: Install nvidia driver from kali repo:
apt-get install nvidia-driver nvidia-xconfigYou can also download latest .run file from Nvidia's website. Execute and procceed with installation. Whether its from Kali's repo or Nvidia's website, procedure is same. Code to install the .run file:
sudo sh ./Nvidia-driver-filename.runStep 5: Now we have to find bus id of our nvidia card:
nvidia-xconfig --query-gpu-info | grep 'BusID : ' | cut -d ' ' -f6it should show something like this:
PCI:1:0:0This is our Bus ID.
Step 6: Now we generate /etc/X11/xorg.conf file with this bus ID according to Nvidia's guide:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "layout"
Screen 0 "nvidia"
Inactive "intel"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "nvidia"
Driver "nvidia"
BusID "**PCI:1:0:0**"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "nvidia"
Device "nvidia"
Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "intel"
Driver "modesetting"
EndSection
Section "Screen"
Identifier "intel"
Device "intel"
EndSection
Replace the string inside ** ** with your Bus ID and save it to /etc/X11/xorg.conf
Step 7: Now we have to create some scripts according to our display manager.Since im using default Kali linux which is GDM,i created two files: /usr/share/gdm/greeter/autostart/optimus.desktop /etc/xdg/autostart/optimus.desktop with the following content:
[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=Optimus
Exec=sh -c "xrandr --setprovideroutputsource modesetting NVIDIA-0; xrandr --auto"
NoDisplay=true
X-GNOME-Autostart-Phase=DisplayServer
Step 8: Now reboot and you should be using Nvidia Driver. Verify if everything is ok: install mesa-utils if not previously installed.
apt-get install mesa-utilsroot@europa:~# glxinfo | grep -i "direct rendering"
direct rendering: YesStep 9: Now you can install the cuda toolkits and drivers. The package nvidia-cuda-toolkit has been deprecated. You can install hashcat-nvidia package as an alternative.
apt install -y ocl-icd-libopencl1 nvidia-driver hashcat-nvidiaStep 10: Now that our system should be ready to go, we need to verify the drivers have been loaded correctly. We can quickly verify this by running the nvidia-smi tool.
root@europa:~# nvidia-smi
Wed Apr 11 11:08:55 2018
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 390.42 Driver Version: 390.42 |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M| Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap| Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
| 0 GeForce MX150 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 Off | N/A |
| N/A 60C P0 N/A / N/A | 368MiB / 2002MiB | 0% Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: GPU Memory |
| GPU PID Type Process name Usage |
|=============================================================================|
| 0 763 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 20MiB |
| 0 793 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 19MiB |
| 0 1108 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 82MiB |
| 0 1191 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 242MiB |
| 0 2132 G gnome-control-center 1MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
FIXING SCREEN TEARING ISSUE: After you successfully boot up with Nvidia Driver, you most probably would be experiencing screen tearing issue eg: glitches while playing videos in VLC, Youtube videos on Chrome/Firefox etc. Luckily, we can fix this by enabling PRIME Sync.
1. Verify if PRIME is disabled
xrandr --verbose|grep PRIMEit should output something like this:
PRIME Synchronization: 0
PRIME Synchronization: 1First one is our connected display.So PRIME sync is disabled.
2. Edit /etc/default/grub and append nvidia-drm.modeset=1 in GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT after quiet.Like the following:
...
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="quiet nvidia-drm.modeset=1"
...3. Save the changes and update grub using the command:
update-grub4. Reboot your system.
5. Verify if PRIME is enabled:
xrandr --verbose|grep PRIMENow it should output:
PRIME Synchronization: 1
PRIME Synchronization: 1If it still shows 0 for you,then there is probably something wrong with your system config/kernel. Since this is still an experimental feature from Nvidia,you are out of luck.
IF YOU STUCK IN BOOT SCREEN
Revert what we have done so far:
Press CTRL+ALT+F2 or CTRL+ALT+F3, login with your password.
apt-get remove --purge nvidia-*
rm -rf /etc/X11/xorg.confRemove those display manager files we created earlier (for GDM):
rm -rf /usr/share/gdm/greeter/autostart/optimus.desktop
rm -rf /etc/xdg/autostart/optimus.desktopNow reboot. You should be able get back to your old system.
If any issues exist please post it in Kali's forum.
My sincere thanks to TiGER511 who did all the hard-work.
I'll soon update this repo on how to switch between your Intel Graphics and Nvidia Graphic card.