NVIDIA driver/library version mismatch after update (llvmpipe / black screen)

[kw6423]

I fixed this issue and wanted to document it in case someone else runs into the same thing.
(I’m still fairly new to Fedora, so feel free to correct anything.)

Issue

After running
sudo dnf upgrade --refresh
and rebooting, the system booted with either black screen or very low resolution like 1024x768 and 60hz

To confirm you have the same issue

Check renderer:

glxinfo | grep "OpenGL renderer"

If you see:

OpenGL renderer string: llvmpipe (...)

This means the system is using CPU rendering (fallback) instead of the GPU.

---

Check driver versions

modinfo -F version nvidia

Example:

580.126.18

---

nvidia-smi

Example:

Failed to initialize NVML: Driver/library version mismatch
NVML library version: 580.142

This confirms a version mismatch between kernel driver and userspace libraries.

---

Cause

After the update, NVIDIA packages ended up on different versions.

NVIDIA requires all components to match exactly:

• kernel module
• OpenGL / NVML libraries
• CUDA libs

If they don’t:

• nvidia-smi fails
• system falls back to llvmpipe
• GUI becomes broken / low resolution

---

Fix

Run:

sudo dnf upgrade --refresh

Then verify all NVIDIA packages:

rpm -qa | grep -E "nvidia" | sort

All versions must match (example):

akmod-nvidia-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64
kmod-nvidia-6.19.10-200.fc43.x86_64-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64
xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-580.126.18-1.fc43.x86_64
...

---

Important

The key packages that must match:

• akmod-nvidia → builds kernel module
• xorg-x11-drv-nvidia → core userspace
• xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs → OpenGL / NVML
• xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda → CUDA (optional but version-coupled)

All must have identical version numbers.

---

Final step

After confirming versions match:

sudo reboot

---

Result

• nvidia-smi works
• no more llvmpipe
• normal resolution and GPU acceleration restored

---

Note

This seems to happen when RPM Fusion packages are temporarily out of sync after an update.

[Comprehensive-Wall28]

Hello!

Thank you a lot for providing these details. It's sadly a very common occurrence based on forum responses and I will attach this post to the common problems.