Solved FreeBSD 14.1 kernel boot crashes when loading nvidia drivers.

[First_Law_of_Unix]

Hello,

I’m trying to install and run nvidia drivers for my RTX 3080 TI GPU on FreeBSD 14.1 OS.

Whenever I put this to the /boot/bootloader.conf file:

nvidia-modeset_load=“YES”

I get the following error:

What could be the issue?

Weird part is that once FreeBSD 14.1 is loaded without the nvidia drivers, I can manually load the nvidia drivers using: “kldload nvidia” and run “nvidia-smi” perfectly. Just that I can’t make it automatic and have the drivers load during boot..

I installed the following driver:
pkg install nvidia-driver

rc.conf (does not crash while booting):
kld_list=“nvidia-modeset“

Here are my PC details:

Thanks for any advice.

 

[T-Aoki]

Don't even attempt to load such a huge and not essential to boot kernel modules like x11/nvidia-driver. (An example of huge but essential-to-boot module should be zfs.ko for Root-on-ZFS environment.)

Staging area for loading kernel and modules by loader is a quite limited resource. Loading via /etc/rc.conf[.local] using kld_list variable doesn't be affected by the limitation.

See the output of pkg info -D x11/nvidia-driver for details.

 

[First_Law_of_Unix]

Thanks for the reply. Makes sense.

 

[First_Law_of_Unix]

Alright I got everything working now.

Nvidia RTX 3080 TI working good with functioning drivers in FreeBSD 14.1

Simply install the driver using pkg install nvidia-driver
Then edit the rc.conf file to add: kld_list=“nvidia-modeset“
Then install the nvidia xorg configuration applier: pkg install nvidia-xconfig
The run: nvidia-xconfig
Then do a reboot and everything should be good.