I am offering these instructions for installing nVidia drivers on CentOS 8 Linux to anyone that can benefit by them. These instructions were used successfully on multiple workstation installations of CentOS 8 with RTX 2080 Super graphics cards. Please note that the instructions below are tailored for a workstation installation of CentOS 8. Modifications may be required for other Linux distros. Also note that the latest nVidia driver version available at the time of this post was NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-455.28.
1. Download the latest nVidia driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-*.run) from nVidia.
2. Prepare for installation
sudo dnf update
sudo dnf groupinstall "Development Tools"
sudo dnf install kernel-devel libglvnd-devel
sudo dnf install epel-release
sudo dnf install dkms
3. Reboot the machine
sudo reboot
4. Edit /etc/default/grub. Append the following to "GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX"
rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau nouveau.modeset=0
5. Change to root user for the following steps
su -
6. Generate a new grub configuration to include above changes
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
7. Create (or edit) /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf and append the following:
blacklist nouveau
8. Backup the old initramfs and build a new one
mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
9. Set default target to multi-user
systemctl set-default multi-user.target
10. Reboot the machine and login as normal user
reboot
11. Install Nvidia driver from the directory where it is located (be sure to use the actual driver file name)
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-*.run
12. Set the default target back to graphical and reboot into the new nVidia system
sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target
sudo reboot
Good luck!
