Hi Everyone,
I have just done some research on the nVidia drivers as it seems that I’m the one that mostly updates them.
There is a now a new driver (396.24) for the latest nVidia cards which not only works with the 4.16 kernels but also with the 4.17 series. There is a problem however; it seems that nVidia have only provided a version for the x86_64 arch. For the x86 arch only 390.67 is available so this release will be a mixed bag with the x86_64 driver supporting more cards than the x86 arch.
With regards the legacy drivers I do not know whether these are operational with the current kernel. If those of you that are using legacy drivers can report back then I will know whether updates or patches are required. I will try to build the latest drivers tomorrow (Sunday) so look out for them I the testing repo. This is of course if no one beats me to it.
Colin
The nouveau drivers are working - and are really what people should be using (better yet, when buying new hardware, avoid anything nvidia like the plague – they don’t care at all if their stuff works with Linux [in fact, they like it when it breaks badly enough to make people run back to Windows so they can install more malware on their machines], so why give them your money?)
Binary-only drivers are impossible to support in the long run (so we want to update to a newer kernel? Or even support another architecture they never thought about? There are nice ARM and even RISC-V boards with PCI slots these days, and AMD graphics cards work great in them).
Please give open drivers a chance before going with the crappy drivers (which doesn’t mean we should kill the binary drivers JUST YET - nouveau still has a few issues that need sorting out).
It would be nice to count on a stable, opensource, and functional driver. I think it is not the case so far. Nouveau caused the system to crash much more than nvidia. Yes, there have been many crashes with nvidia too.
Don’t understand. Did you mean, 64 bits is supported and 32 bits doesn’t by new nvidia drivers?
Both arches are available at version 390.67 only x86_64 is available at 396.24. I will build 390.57 for test and if it’s ok I guess we will go with that. If it still doesn’t work then we are stuck with the single 64bit arch.
Corrected the typo
Anyone with nvidia hardware bookmark this link. Post edit: And this link as well is relevant. NVidia has ended driver support for 32 bit hardware.
390.67 (not 390.57) is latest long-lived driver for 64 and 32 bit.
396.24 is latest short-lived for 64 bit.
387.34 is latest short-lived for 32 bit.
Just the facts.
Post edit dadgummit!: And please note that the first link above also has a link to a page that tells what driver is for what hardware.
A few questions:
Isn’t 390.57 older than 390.67? Why to go for it?
Is 32bit going to become obsolete? If so, why not providing also 396.24?
Thanks
Did you see the link above? FWIW: This has nothing to do with OpenMandriva. It is a decision by nVidia the company.
Because it does not exist.
OpenMandriva does not,
can not,
someone would go to jail if we tried,
create nVidia software. It is created by nVidia the company. Like some other Linux distros OpenMandriva repackages the software. Other Linux distros won’t touch the stuff.
Aside: I suppose whether 32-bit is obsolete depends on how you define obsolete. And perhaps ones viewpoint and whether someone does or does not own any 32-bit hardware. As things go in the world of computer science 32-bit is very old. Many Linux distros have already removed support for 32-bit. AFAIK plans for Lx 4 include support for i686, x86_64, and full support for aarch64 and armv7hnl. i586 will no longer be supported.
I’ve not been clear. I meant,
Is 32bit going to be obsolete for the whole industry (not for the nvidia alone)? I guess that this is likely to happen soon since there are no longer 32bit processors being made. Also, some software providers are no longer issuing 32bit versions of their products.
Thus, I ask if the future is not to count on 32bit software why not having the 396.24(64bit) in Openmandriva?
From my view 32 bit already is obsolete. Post edit: (This is an opinion that I may change my mind about though.)
The trend is for organizations to discontinue support. But one of many good things about Linux World is that there will be for some time distros, Zorin comes to mind, whose specific purpose is to run on older, and considered by some people obsolete, hardware. So it tends to boil down to an individual decision if the hardware is useful. Some people will go to great lengths to keep something older to be still useful. (I’m sort of doing this with myself…)
As @bero has frequently mentioned we don’t want to be encouraging people to throw away still useful electronic hardware.
Again, let me try a little bit clearer,
Supporting 32bit with 390.# drivers and also providing 396.# drivers are not mutually incompatible.
nvidia-current and nvidia-long-lived are now available in the Lx3 non-free repos
nvidia-current only provides x86_64 arch whereas nvidia-long-lived provides both.
Please test if you have the appropriate hardware and report back.
Colin
Downloaded and apparently no problem to install:
/lib/modules/4.16.13-desktop-1omv/kernel/drivers/char/drm/nvidia-current.ko
/lib/modules/4.16.13-desktop-1omv/kernel/drivers/char/drm/nvidia-uvm.ko
/lib/modules/4.16.13-desktop-1omv/kernel/drivers/char/drm/nvidia-drm.ko
/lib/modules/4.16.13-desktop-1omv/kernel/drivers/char/drm/nvidia-modeset.ko
However, this is a hybrid graphics laptop which uses nvidia drivers with the help of bbswitch which still have problems. dkms-bbswtich does generate bbswitch.ko but does not send it to kernel’s tree.
I manually copied bbswitch.ko to,
/lib/modules/4.16.13-desktop-1omv/kernel/drivers/acpi/bbswitch.ko
but with no luck:
$ optirun glxspheres64
[ 854.762175] [ERROR]Cannot access secondary GPU - error: Could not load GPU driver
[ 854.762219] [ERROR]Aborting because fallback start is disabled.
I then cannot say everything is working fine so far. I have another computer with a nvidia card as its primary graphical card. As soon as I can test on it I’ll post the results.
Hi,
Did you run "depmode -a " after you copied the driver across? It may also be necessary to pre-load that module too. Maybe even incorporate it in the initrd…
Colin
So we have had one person try the nvidia drivers for the latest kernel? Really, just one?
Did you mean bbswitch.ko? I guess nvidia drivers are OK since they were seamlessly generated and instaled by dkms.
This might be good news because it may mean others have tried and found no problems to report!
Yes I meant bbswitch.ko
There seems not to be a depmode command. I tried
$ depmod -a
instead.
No luck. I still have the same problem to “upload” nvidia drivers with optirun command.
I might contact bbswitch developers …
Changes in initrd will only affect next boot, isn’t it?