[BUG] AlmaLinux 10 - NVidia drivers installation not working on some systems

[DonnieAlex]

The documentation makes it easy to believe that 2 dnf commands would suffice to get the drivers up and running.
And most likely it is so, on a specific set of configurations.

However, personal workstations, tailored for game industry work as in my case, pose different challenges

Regular installation procedure as outlined in the docs:

sudo dnf install almalinux-release-nvidia-driver

sudo dnf install nvidia-open # <--- NOT THE MINIMAL, the minimal did not work for me.

sudo modprobe nvidia_drm OR reboot

at this point, my main desktop was screwed. Only one monitor worked, and at a VERY low resolution. During boot
it was complaining it failed to initialize nvidia_drm, as it couldn't find it.
my laptop instead did not show any visible issue. Running nvidia-smi showed no processes though.

activate persistence service or cards with multiple HDMI ports will revert to one port only after
sleep / logout / lock screen (like in my case)

sudo start nvidia-persistenced.service

sudo systemctl enable nvidia-persistenced.service

create or update this file -> /etc/dracut.conf.d/nvidia-gsp.conf by adding the following
the folder named after the driver version needs to be updated at every driver update!

install_items+=" /lib/firmware/nvidia/590.48.01/gsp_ga10x.bin " # notice the trailing spaces, they're required

rebuild initramfs!!

sudo dracut -f

reboot

at this point for my main workstation i did not need the following, nvidia-smi showed ALL graphic processes running on the GPU. On my laptop, instead, I did
The laptop was running on the integrated GPU all the time (nvidia-smi processes section showed no processes running) until apps would explicitly
request the nvidia GPU capabilities (benchmarking the Vulkan nvidia GPU showed the process in the tab created by nvidia-smi)
add the following environment variable to the file /etc/environment (assuming KDE installed)
devices names as they appear from the command lshw -short OR if the name is missing, the whole H/W path

KWIN_DRM_DEVICES=/dev/dri/{other_device_name}:/dev/dri/{nvidia_device_name}

My main Desktop info from fastfetch

---

OS: AlmaLinux 10.1 (Heliotrope Lion) x86_64
Host: Intel Z790 Workstation
Kernel: Linux 6.12.0-124.21.1.el10_1.x86_64
Display (Q32V4WG5): 2560x1440 @ 75 Hz in 32 [External]
Display (Q32V4WG5): 2560x1440 @ 75 Hz in 32 [External] *
DE: KDE Plasma 6.4.5
WM: KWin (Wayland)
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-14900KS (32) @ 6.20 GHz
GPU: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4090 [Discrete]
Memory: 3.37 GiB / 188.47 GiB (2%)
Swap: 0 B / 32.00 GiB (0%)
Disk (/): 4.39 GiB / 3.61 TiB (0%) - btrfs
Locale: en_GB.UTF-8