Score:1

"Could not start Display server on vt 1" with NVidia but only when SB Audigy is installed?

cn flag

So I have an ASRock X570 Pro4 motherboard, which has AMD's weirdo intel-hd-audio-but-not-really Matisse/Rocketship onboard audio stuff, which is reported to be a pain in the rear all over the place. I got that showing up, at least, but still got absolutely no sound out of it.

So I got a Creative Blaster Audigy FX on Amazon, pretty cheap and it's been around for 8 years so I figure there is likely to be decent support for it.

However, whenever the Audigy is installed in any PCI-E slot, SDDM logs the following:

Jul 28 16:18:02 hugh-desktop sddm[1358]: Failed to read display number from pipe
Jul 28 16:18:02 hugh-desktop sddm[1358]: Could not start Display server on vt 1

and then I get back to the ASRock logo - and numlock is unresponsive, all I can do with the keyboard is AltGr+SysRq+x. Pressing the power button brings Plymouth back and then the machine shuts down cleanly.

The only other PCI-E devices are the NVMe SSD (in an NVMe SSD slot on the motherboard) and an NVidia card. After removing the Audigy, it all works. (I can't remove the NVidia card, since my CPU has no onboard graphics capability.)

Any ideas?

Score:0
cn flag

So what I thought might be the issue was something hardware-side that was interfering with communication between the software and the NVidia card. In fact what I also discovered was that adding other PCIE devices also caused the exact same issue - an old, old Radeon card, and a gigabit ethernet card.

So I created a UDEV rule that would remove the Sound Card from the device graph when it was detected - echo 1 > /sys/bus/pci/devices/0000\:03\:00.0/remove - in the hope of at least getting the NVidia card to work, and then potentially rescanning the PCI bus at the highest runlevel.

That didn't work. But then I removed the sound card (but not the UDEV rule) and rebooted, but then my ethernet had disappered. ODD!! So I checked lspci and noticed that the NVidia card had MOVED TO A DIFFERENT PCI DEVICE ID. WTH!! So adding cards to this board potentially shunts PCI IDs about, and in the case of an NVidia card, it's necessary to update the PCI ID in /etc/X11/xorg.conf whenever you add a new device - or remove one.

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