disabling nouveau

My goal is to install nvidia cuda for some machine learning on a new Lenovo Thinkpad P52S laptop running Fedora 30. The laptop comes with both an integrated intel card and an nvidia quadro P500 card (I think this is called Optimus). I want to use the intel card for display and the nvidia exclusively for machine learning. I've followed various tutorials and blogs on the web, most notably the rpmfusion howto: https://rpmfusion.org/Howto/NVIDIA and a recent fedora magazine article: https://fedoramagazine.org/install-nvidia-gpu/ The latter says (in the comments) that there is no need to disable nouveau but I had to do that in the past every time I installed the nvidia drivers, so I'm trying to do that now as well. So I did the following: 1. Installed the nvidia rpms: dnf install xorg-x11-drv-nvidia akmod-nvidia which installed the following + dependencies: [root@thinkpad ~]# rpm -qa | grep -i nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64 nvidia-settings-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-libs-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64 akmod-nvidia-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda-libs-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64 xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-kmodsrc-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64 kmod-nvidia-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64-430.40-1.fc30.x86_64 2. The dnf install command modified the boot options, to blacklist nouveau: [root@thinkpad ~]# cat /etc/default/grub GRUB_TIMEOUT=5 GRUB_DISTRIBUTOR="$(sed 's, release .*$,,g' /etc/system-release)" GRUB_DEFAULT=saved GRUB_DISABLE_SUBMENU=true GRUB_TERMINAL_OUTPUT="console" GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau modprobe.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1 resume=UUID=d1406222-e963-4043-a6f9-10c784752ed8 rhgb quiet" GRUB_DISABLE_RECOVERY="true" GRUB_ENABLE_BLSCFG=true 3. I read that is not enough though, as if nouveau is in the initram disk it will still do modeset = 1, so I blacklisted it in modprobe.d and created a new initram disk: [root@thinkpad ~]# cat /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_nouveau.conf blacklist nouveau options nouveau modeset=0 # backup nouveau initram disk [root@thinkpad boot]# cp initramfs-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64.img initramfs-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64_nouveau.img # create new one: [root@thinkpad boot]# dracut --force Now [root@thinkpad boot]# lsinitrd initramfs-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64.img | grep -i nouveau -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 44 Feb 14 2019 etc/modprobe.d/blacklist_nouveau.conf drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 0 Feb 14 2019 usr/lib/modules/5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau -rw-r--r-- 1 root root 636252 Feb 14 2019 usr/lib/modules/5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau.ko.xz so it picked up the blacklist_nouveau.conf file. 4. set runlevel 3 systemctl set-default multi-user.target 5. I'm running Xorg, not Wayland: [root@thinkpad ~]# pidof xinit 1351 [root@thinkpad ~]# pidof Xwayland [root@thinkpad ~]# 6. Reboot. Even before starting X, I still get nouveau: [root@thinkpad ~]# lsmod | grep nouveau nouveau 2265088 0 mxm_wmi 16384 1 nouveau ttm 118784 1 nouveau i2c_algo_bit 16384 2 i915,nouveau drm_kms_helper 225280 2 i915,nouveau drm 495616 8 drm_kms_helper,i915,ttm,nouveau wmi 36864 4 intel_wmi_thunderbolt,wmi_bmof,mxm_wmi,nouveau video 49152 3 thinkpad_acpi,i915,nouveau I can, however modprobe -r nouveau and things seem OK. But what do I do to have it not load on boot? When this happened in the past, as a last resort, I removed the appropriate rpms, but now the nouveau driver seems to be part of the kernel-modules package: [root@thinkpad ~]# rpm -qf /usr/lib/modules/5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64/kernel/drivers/gpu/drm/nouveau/nouveau.ko.xz kernel-modules-5.2.11-200.fc30.x86_64 Any help on this, anyone? Thanks!