Hi. I am able to boot my PopOS 22.04 system under any kernel version 6.0.x and below, but get a blank/black screen when I switch to any kernel version 6.1.x. There is some initial disk activity when booting 6.1 but that stops after a few seconds and the screens remain blank. Any ideas on what I can do to narrow down the issue?

I am running liquorix with the following kernel parameters as I run virtual machines under PopOS where I pass in the second GPU:

"quiet splash iommu=pt intel_iommu=on pcie_acs_override=downstream"

The second GPU is using a virtio driver.

Here are my system specs if that is of any use:

NAME="Pop!_OS"
VERSION="22.04 LTS"
ID=pop
ID_LIKE="ubuntu debian"
PRETTY_NAME="Pop!_OS 22.04 LTS"
VERSION_ID="22.04"
HOME_URL="https://pop.system76.com"
VERSION_CODENAME=jammy
UBUNTU_CODENAME=jammy


*-core
description: Motherboard
product: Z97-A-USB31
vendor: ASUSTeK COMPUTER INC.
version: Rev 1.xx
*-firmware
description: BIOS
vendor: American Megatrends Inc.
version: 3503
date: 04/18/2018
*-memory
description: System Memory
physical id: 46
slot: System board or motherboard
size: 32GiB
*-bank:0..4
description: DIMM DDR3 Synchronous 1333 MHz (0.8 ns)
product: CMZ16GX3M2A1866C10
vendor: AMI
size: 8GiB
width: 64 bits
clock: 1333MHz (0.8ns)
*-cpu
description: CPU
product: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4790K CPU @ 4.00GHz
slot: SOCKET 1150
size: 799MHz
capacity: 4400MHz
width: 64 bits
clock: 100MHz
*-pci:0 *-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GP106 [GeForce GTX 1060 6GB]
*-pci:1 *-display
*-display
description: VGA compatible controller
product: GM206 [GeForce GTX 960 4GB]

Thanks and regards.
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Show at a minimum: inxi -bxxz

much more useful for graphics and display issues.

also, get rid of that 'quiet splash' from your grub kernel boot parameters, 10 to 1 it's booting fine, but the best way to not know is to use those values.

Keep in mind: 'boot' means that the kernel boots, and the operating system is running.
Desktop not starting is totally non related to that process, and is almost never related to boot issues, and almost always related to desktop/xorg/wayland/driver issues.
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Here you go:


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Hmm, try: inxi -Gxxz

that will show the monitors etc. Forgot that -bxxz shows the shorter graphics form.

As I would have bet, nvidia drivers. vfio-pci is a new one for me, never seen that one before.

The goal is to see which device is driving your monitors.

10 to 1 odds that the nvidia driver doesn't support the latest kernel, keep in mind, free drivers mean the code is open and free, and it's generally reasonably safe to keep the graphics at latest kernel, that's not the case with nvidia drivers.
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vfio is for passing through the 2nd GPU in QEMU/KVM. GTX 1060 is the primary GPU with three monitors, and the second GPU is connected to one of the monitors on the monitors 2nd HDMI input.

Here's the graphics section:



I am reinstalling 6.1 and will boot without the quiet and splash kernel parameters and update shortly.

Thanks for the assistance.
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You were spot on. I went back up to nvidia driver v525 and the system boots up fine with the 6.1 kernel. I'd actually downgraded to 515 from 525 a few months back due to display issues, but now it looks good on 6.1.

Thanks again for the insights.
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I've done this stuff a long time, but have never seen that driver driving an nvidia device. Thanks for clarifying that.

Note also a terminology issue, your system was always booting up fine, what was happening was that when xorg tried to start, it crashed because the nvidia driver didn't support the kernel.

That's an important distinction, booting is one thing, xorg / wayland starting is a totally different thing.

This is one of the things that makes supporting linux desktop users hard.

The easy way to see that the system has booted fine when splash and quiet are being used is to simply wait until the system seems quiet, and go: ctrl + alt + f2 which should generally shift you to the console login screen. On some systems, the graphics is on F1, though usually it's on F6. F2 is almost never used by graphics.

As soon as you see the login screen, you know the system booted fine, and that the display manager or compositor in the case of wayland failed to start, and in the case of nvidia, the driver failed.

You'll get much more graphics data with -Gaz if you don't use root, either regular user + sudo, or just regular user, will give a complete gfx report.
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Hi. The vfio driver is used when you want to pass through a device to a virtual machine. In my case I have a dual GPU motherboard with two GPU's, so I want my first GPU for the host (pop os in my case) and the second to use the vfio-pci driver so it can be passed through to some guest OS. The guest OS will see the GPU as a native device and use it accordingly when the appropriate driver is installed on the guest.

This pass through guide is what I used and explains things: https://forum.level1techs.com/t/vfio-in-2019-pop-os-how-to-general-guide-though-draft/142287

Thanks again for the help.
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well learn something new every day, lol, thanks.

How do you get the system to use the pass through driver? never mind, heh, directions you linked to, no wonder I never heard of this, it's non trivial to get setup.

This kind of general exception is useful for me to know about since it can help explain future issues I might come across in inxi.
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I've also updated sgfxi, which is largely only in maintenance mode now, to add no 515/520 nvidia driver support for 6.x kernels.
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