Installing-Nvidia-drivers-on-Kali-Linux

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.

So lets get started-

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/Linux

root@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 && reboot

Step 3: System will reboot and nouveau should be disabled. Verify if nouveau is disabled:

lsmod |grep -i nouveau

If shows nothing,means nouveau successfully disabled.

Step 4: Install nvidia driver from kali repo:

apt-get install  nvidia-driver nvidia-xconfig

You 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.run

Step 5: Now we have to find bus id of our nvidia card:

nvidia-xconfig --query-gpu-info | grep 'BusID : ' | cut -d ' ' -f6

it should show something like this:

PCI:1:0:0

This 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-utils

root@europa:~# glxinfo | grep -i "direct rendering"
direct rendering: Yes

Step 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-nvidia

Step 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 PRIME

it should output something like this:

PRIME Synchronization: 0
PRIME Synchronization: 1

First 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-grub

4. Reboot your system.

5. Verify if PRIME is enabled:

xrandr --verbose|grep PRIME

Now it should output:

PRIME Synchronization: 1
PRIME Synchronization: 1

If 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.conf

Remove those display manager files we created earlier (for GDM):

rm -rf /usr/share/gdm/greeter/autostart/optimus.desktop
rm -rf /etc/xdg/autostart/optimus.desktop

Now 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.