Nouveau on Dell G7 7700
April 2024
This is mostly for my own records.
For work I have a Dell G7 7700 laptop. This is a gaming-type laptop with 32GB RAM (honestly disappointed it can’t have 64GB or more), a decent 6-core 12-thread i7-10750H, and both Intel UHD graphics and an Nvidia RTX 2070 mobile graphics card.
Originally I used the proprietary Nvidia drivers. However, I ran into a variety of issues and decided to try the Nouveau drivers since they seem to have much better support for Turing+ cards recently.
Here’s what worked:
- Remove all
nvidia-*packages - Remove bumblebee/supergfxctl
- Install
mesa,lib32-mesa: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Nouveau - Remove
xf86-video-nouveauto use the native modesetting instead of Xorg DDX - Enable Early KMS in mkinitcpio: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Kernel_mode_setting#Early_KMS_start
- Enable power management
with
nouveau.config=NvGspRm=1in the/etc/kernel/cmdline - Linux kernel >=6.7 for the GSP firmware support
I now have a stable Wayland multi-monitor setup that boots well and resumes from suspend without issue.