Blackscreen in combination with LUKS encrypted drive

[Poid-bit]

Hi! First of all, thank you for the guide.

I encountered the following issue.
If you choose to fully encrypt your drive during the installation process of Fedora Workstation (or KDE Plasma Desktop Edition) and follow the steps in the guide, you will get a blackscreen when rebooting after the modinfo -F version nvidia final step. You should see the LUKS prompt to enter the password for the encrypted drive.

The cause of this issue is apparently this:

When Fedora boots on an encrypted drive, it first loads a tiny, temporary "mini-OS" into your RAM. This is called the initramfs.
The sole job of this initramfs is to do whatever is necessary to find and start the real Fedora OS. In your case, its most important job is to ask you for your LUKS password to unlock the drive.
To show you a graphical password prompt, this initramfs needs a graphics driver. By default, it includes the simple, universal nouveau driver.
The NVIDIA installation guide you followed correctly tells you to blacklist the nouveau driver. This prevents it from conflicting with the real NVIDIA driver after the system boots.
Here is the conflict: You have now created an initramfs that is trying to show a graphical LUKS prompt, but it has no graphics driver. The nouveau driver it normally uses is blacklisted, and the proprietary nvidia driver is not included in this "mini-OS" by default.

In order to not be stuck with a blackscreen, you would have to do this prior to rebooting:

• sudo nano /etc/dracut.conf.d/nvidia.conf
• Add the following line add_drivers+=" nvidia nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm nvidia_drm "
• Save the file and exit by pressing Ctrl+x, then y to confirm, then Enter.
• sudo dracut --force This can take a few minutes.

Now you can reboot. You will see the graphical LUKS prompt and your drivers are installed correctly.

If you already messed up and rebooted without doing these steps (blackscreen), this is how I still managed to save my installation:

1. Reboot the computer.
2. When the GRUB menu appears, press e to edit.
3. Find the line that starts with linux
4. Remove rhgb and quiet if they are there, go to the very end of that line, and add a space, followed by the number 3.
5. Press Ctrl+x to boot. This will get you to a text-based login where you can enter the LUKS password and afterwards your Fedora username and password.
6. Now follow the earlier steps above (sudo nano /etc/dracut.conf.d/nvidia.conf) etc.

Please integrate this information into your guide, in order to save some people from getting a headache 🙂

[Comprehensive-Wall28]

Hello! This is very interesting. I added your steps to the guide.

Thank you a lot for providing the information! It really helps.

[Poid-bit]

@Comprehensive-Wall28 Thank you for adding it! By the way, the file we create with sudo nano /etc/dracut.conf.d/nvidia.conf is a new configuration file (at least on my fresh setup), so the description

wouldn't make sense as the file is empty. Sorry for not specifying earlier.

[Comprehensive-Wall28]

@Comprehensive-Wall28 Thank you for adding it! By the way, the file we create with sudo nano /etc/dracut.conf.d/nvidia.conf is a new configuration file (at least on my fresh setup), so the description

wouldn't make sense as the file is empty. Sorry for not specifying earlier.

Fixed. Thanks!

[kitlith]

It may also be worth adding some method of rerunning dracut after akmods finishes.

https://discussion.fedoraproject.org/t/making-dracut-run-after-akmods/129009/15 has a snippet, I have no idea if that's the best way to accomplish things.

[Poid-bit]

@Comprehensive-Wall28 Yes, there are definitely more steps needed than what I described.

After I installed updates, everything broke and I couldn't get it to work again.

Regrettably I am back on Ubuntu now lol...

[kitlith]

The snippet from the forum didn't work for me on this last update, that could've been because I didn't run a systemctl daemon-reload or something though. Will try to remember to report back after another kernel upgrade, to determine if the snippet is broken or if it was just bad state on my end.

However, adding nomodeset to the kernel commandline seems to act as a shockingly effective workaround? it'll show the password entry screen at a low resolution, and then the nvidia kernel module will load in afterwards and still modeset?

[kotikisu]

The snippet from the forum didn't work for me on this last update, that could've been because I didn't run a systemctl daemon-reload or something though. Will try to remember to report back after another kernel upgrade, to determine if the snippet is broken or if it was just bad state on my end.

However, adding nomodeset to the kernel commandline seems to act as a shockingly effective workaround? it'll show the password entry screen at a low resolution, and then the nvidia kernel module will load in afterwards and still modeset?

Same for me, thanks for sharing the nomodeset fix!
After booting the system with nomodeset I ran sudo dracut --force and then the password entry screen shows up at full resolution without nomodeset again.

[Comprehensive-Wall28]

Thanks everyone for the information! I was hesitant to add the modest fix but since @kotikisu confirmed the fix works I will add it to the steps to hopefully solve this issue for good.

[kitlith]

I think nomodeset is best kept as a tool to keep in mind when things break. i.e., it's an alternative to the instructions you already provide that I had missed, since I never read the black screen troubleshooting section and there was no mention in the full disk encryption section. Despite my comment about it being "shockingly effective", I don't have the knowledge to prove that the system is actually operating at optimal performance, and usually usage of nomodeset does mean that some kind of graphical acceleration has been disabled.

I'd rather find a solution that either ensures that plymouth/disk decryption prompt can still show up without the nvidia drivers present, or ensures that the nvidia drivers actually get included in the initrd.

[Comprehensive-Wall28]

I think nomodeset is best kept as a tool to keep in mind when things break. i.e., it's an alternative to the instructions you already provide that I had missed, since I never read the black screen troubleshooting section and there was no mention in the full disk encryption section. Despite my comment about it being "shockingly effective", I don't have the knowledge to prove that the system is actually operating at optimal performance, and usually usage of nomodeset does mean that some kind of graphical acceleration has been disabled.

I'd rather find a solution that either ensures that plymouth/disk decryption prompt can still show up without the nvidia drivers present, or ensures that the nvidia drivers actually get included in the initrd.

Well said. Considering this, I will add it in list of common issues for now till we find a better solution.