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NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux (hackaday.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 170 points 10 months ago (23 children)

I've had so many problems with Nvidia GPUs on Linux over the years that I now refuse to buy anything Nvidia. AMD cards work flawlessly and get very long-term support.

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  • [–] 48 points 10 months ago* (17 children)

    I'm with you, I know we've had a lot of recent Linux converts, but I don't get why so many who've used Linux for years still buy Nvidia.

    Like yeah, there's going to be some cool stuff, but it's going to be clunky and temporary.

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  • [–] 29 points 10 months ago (12 children)

    When people switch to Linux they don’t do a lot of research beforehand. I, for one, didn’t know that Nvidia doesn’t work well with it until I had been using it for years.

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  • [–] 14 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    To be fair, Nvidia supports their newer GPUs well enough, so you may not have any problems for a while. But once they decide to end support for a product line, it's basically a death sentence for that hardware. That's what happened to me recently with the 470 driver. Older GPU worked fine until a kernel update broke the driver. There's nobody fixing it anymore, and they won't open-source even obsolete drivers.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I JUST ran into this issue myself. I’m running Proxmox on an old Laptop and wanted to use its 750M…. Which is one of those legacy cards now that I guess means I’d need to downgrade the kernel to use?

    I’m not knowledgeable enough to know the risks or work I’d be looking at to get it working so for now, it’s on hiatus.

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  • [–] 0 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (7 children)

    Similar for me. All the talk about what software Linux couldn't handle, I didn't learn that Linux is incompatible with Nvidia until AFTER I updated my GPU. I don't want to buy another GPU after less than a year, but Windows makes me want to do a sudoku in protest... but also my work and design software wont run properly on Linux and all anybody can talk about is browsers and games.

    I'm damned whether I switch or not.

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  • [–] 26 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Linux hates Nvidia

    got that backwards

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    My point is they dont work together. I can believe Nvidia 'started' it, but it doesnt matter or help me solve my problem. I've decided I want to try Linux but I can't afford another card so I'm doing what I can.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    You somehow still learned wrong, and I don't understand how any of that happened. Nvidia not working well with Linux is so widely known and talked about, I knew about it, and the actual reason (which is the reverse of what you think), for several years before switching. I feel like you must have never tried to look anything up, spent any time in a place like lemmy or any forums with a Linux focus and basically must have decided to and kept yourself in some bubble of ignorance and no connection to learn anything.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 child)

    This is an uncharitable interpretation of what I said.

    Nvidia doesn't tell me it doesn't work. Linux users do. When I first used Linux for coding all those years ago, my GPU wasn't relevant, nobody mentioned it during my code bootcamp or computer science certification several years ago, and ubuntu and Kubuntu both booted fine.

    When I upgraded my GPU, I got Nvidia. It was available and I knew what to expect. Simple as.

    Then as W10 (and W11) got increasingly intolerable, I came to Linux communities to learn about using Linux as a Windows replcement, looking into distros like Mint and Garuda, and behold: I come across users saying Linux has compatibility issues with Nvidia. Perhaps because it is 'so well known' most don't think to mention it, I learned about it from a random comment on a meme about gaming.

    I also looked into tutorials on getting Affinity design software to work on which distros, and the best I could find was shit like, I finally got it to run so long as I don't [do these three basic functions].

    I don't care who started it, I can already believe it's the for-profit company sucking up to genAI. But right now that doesn't help me. I care that it's true and that's the card I have, and I'm still searching for distros that will let me switch and meets work needs and not just browsing or games.

    I'm here now, aware that they don't work, still looking for the best solution I can afford, because I did look up Linux.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Nvidia's poor Linux support has been a thing for decades.

    If at all, the situation has recently improved. And that only after high-profile Linux developers telling Nvidia to get their shit together.

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  • [–] 20 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Even now, CUDA is gold standard for data science / ML / AI related research and development. AMD is slowly brining around their ROCm platform, and Vulcan is gaining steam in that area. I’d love to ditch my nvidia cards and go exclusively AMD but nvidia supporting CUDA on consumer cards was a seriously smart move that AMD needs to catch up with.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Sorry for prying for details, but why exactly do you need NVIDIA?

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  • [–] 5 points 10 months ago

    CUDA is an Nvidia technology and they've gone out of their way to make it difficult for a competitor to come up with a compatible implementation. With cross-vendor alternatives like OpenCL and compute shaders, they've not put resources into achieving performance parity, so if you write something in both CUDA and OpenCL, and run them both on an Nvidia card, the CUDA-based implementation will go way faster. Most projects prioritise the need to go fast above the need to work on hardware from more than one vendor. Fifteen years ago, an OpenCL-based compute application would run faster on an AMD card than a CUDA-based one would run on an Nvidia card, even if the Nvidia card was a chunk faster in gaming, so it's not that CUDA's inherently loads faster. That didn't give AMD a huge advantage in market share as not very much was going on that cared significantly about GPU compute.

    Also, Nvidia have put a lot of resources over the last fifteen years into adding CUDA support to other people's projects, so when things did start springing up that needed GPU compute, a lot of them already worked on Nvidia cards.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago*

    I had an old NVidia gtx 970 on my previous machine when I switched to Linux and it was the source of 95% of my problems.

    It died earlier this year so I finally upgraded to a new machine and put an Intel Arc B580 in it as a stop gap in hopes that video cards prices would regain some sanity eventually in a year or two. No problems whatsoever with it since then.

    Now that AI is about to ruin the GPU market again I decided to bite the bullet and get myself an AMD RX 9070 XT before the prices go through the roof. I ain't touching NVidia's cards with a 10 foot pole. I might be able to sell my B580 for the same price I originally bought it for in a few months.

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  • [–] 10 points 10 months ago

    Yeah, I stopped using Nvidia like 20 years ago. I think my last Nvidia card may have been a GeForce MX, then I switched to a Matrox card for a time before landing on ATI/AMD.

    Back then AMD was only just starting their open source driver efforts so the “good” driver was still proprietary, but I stuck with them to support their efforts with my wallet. I’m glad I did because it’s been well over a decade since I had any GPU issues, and I no longer stress about whether the hardware I buy is going to work or not (so long as the Kernel is up to date).

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    • [–] 71 points 10 months ago (29 children)

    Those are the GPUs they were selling — and a whole lot of people were buying — until about five years ago. Not something you'd expect to suddenly be unsupported. I guess Nvidia must be going broke or something, they can't even afford to maintain their driver software any more.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Nvidia isn't exactly broke...I thought they were the most valuable company in the world? Or the second, sometimes they trade places with Apple

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Poor Nvidia... the AI bubble is going to burst, the gamer market has all kinds of reasons to hate them now, and all they'll have to console themselves with is several trillion dollars.

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  • [–] 9 points 10 months ago* (15 children)

    I don’t get what needs support, exactly. Maybe I’m not yet fully awake, which tends to make me stupid. But the graphics card doesn’t change. The driver translates OS commands to GPU commands, so if the target is not moving, changes can only be forced by changes to the OS, which puts the responsibility on the Kernel devs. What am I missing?

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  • [–] 45 points 10 months ago* (12 children)

    The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates. The old Nvidia driver is not open source or free software, so nobody other than Nvidia themselves can practically or legally do it. Nvidia could of course change that if they don't want to do even the bare minimum of maintenance.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (11 children)

    The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates.

    That’s a false implication. The OS just needs to keep the interface to the kernel stable, just like it has to with every other piece of hardware or software. You don’t just double the current you send over USB and expect cable manufacturers to adapt. As the consumer of the API (which the driver is from the kernel’s point of view) you deal with what you get and don’t make demands to the API provider.

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  • [–] 27 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    Device drivers are not like other software in at least one important way: They have access to and depend on kernel internals which are not visible to applications, and they need to be rebuilt when those change. Something as huge and complicated as a GPU driver depends on quite a lot of them. The kernel does not provide a stable binary interface for drivers so they will frequently need to be recompiled to work with new versions of linux, and then less frequently the source code also needs modification as things are changed, added to, and improved.

    This is not unique to Linux, it's pretty normal. But it is a deliberate choice that its developers made, and people generally seem to think it was a good one.

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  • [–] -5 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    They have access to and depend on kernel internals

    That sounds like a stupid idea to me. But what do I know? I live in the ivory tower of application development where APIs are well-defined and stable.

    Thanks for explaining.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    I don't generally disagree, but

    You don’t just double the current you send over USB and expect cable manufacturers to adapt

    That's pretty much how we got to the point where USB is the universal charging standard: by progressively pushing the allowed current from the initially standardized 100 mA all the way to 5 A of today. A few of those pushes were just manufacturers winging it and pushing/pulling significantly more current than what was standardized, assuming the other side will adapt.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (5 children)

    The default standard power limit is still the same as it ever was on each USB version. There's negotiation that needs to happen to tell the device how much power is allowed, and if you go over, I think over current protection is part of the USB spec for safety reasons. There's a bunch of different protocols, but USB always starts at 5V, and 0.1A for USB 2.0, and devices need to negotiate for more. (0.15A I think for USB 3.0 which has more conductors)

    As an example, USB 2.0 can signal a charging port (5V / 1.5A max) by putting a 200 ohm resistor across the data pins.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    The default standard power limit is still the same as it ever was on each USB version

    Nah, the default power limit started with 100 mA or 500 mA for "high power devices". There are very few devices out there today that limit the current to that amount.

    It all begun with non-spec host ports which just pushed however much current the circuitry could muster, rather than just the required 500 mA. Some had a proprietary way to signal just how much they're willing to push (this is why iPhones used to be very fussy about the charger you plug them in to), but most cheapy ones didn't. Then all the device manufacturers started pulling as much current as the host would provide, rather than limiting to 500 mA. USB-BC was mostly an attempt to standardize some of the existing usage, and USB-PD came much later.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    A USB host providing more current than the device supports isn't an issue though. A USB device simply won't draw more than it needs. There's no danger of dumping 5A into your 20 year old mouse because it defaults to a low power 100mA device. Even if the port can supply 10A / 5V or something silly, the current is limited by the voltage and load (the mouse).

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    Well, the original comment was about "pushing more current through than the spec", and that's pretty much what we did...

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Well, regardless, the spec only cares about devices drawing more current than the host can supply, and that has always been consistent. Electricity doesn't really work in a way the host can "push" current, the only way it could do that would be with a higher voltage, which would damage anything not designed for it. But that's what the USB-PD spec is for, negotiating what voltage to supply, up to 48V now.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

    Electricity doesn’t really work in a way the host can “push” current

    On a basic level this is precisely how electricity works, a power supply literally pushes electrons by creating a difference in electric field magnitude between two points; or, in other words, by applying an electromotive force to electrons; or, in other words, by creating a voltage between two points. A load then does something with those electrons that usually creates an opposing electric field, be it heating a wire, spinning a motor, or sustaining a chemical reaction within a battery. The amount of power produced by the source and released at the load is proportional to (voltage) * (number of electrons being pushed by the supply per unit of time); usually, this is the limiting factor for most power supplies. They can hold a steady voltage until they have to push too many electrons, then the voltage starts dropping.

    Edit: I see what you mean now. Yeah, for a given voltage, it is the load that determines the current, so there's no safety issue with this for the load. However there could be issues with the cables. IIRC there was an issue with noise being introduced by higher current draws that meant you couldn't charge and transfer data at the same time with some cables.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago* (1 child)

    Using 10 year old hardware with 10 year old drivers on 10 year old OS require no further work.

    The hardware doesn't change, but the OS do.

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  • [+] -22 points 10 months ago (10 children)

    Pascal is coming up on 10 years old. You can't expect companies to support things forever.

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  • [–] 33 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    They started 9 years ago, but they remained popular into 2020 and according to wikipedia the last new pascal model was released in 2022. The 1080 and the 1060 are both still pretty high up on the Steam list of the most common GPUs.

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  • [+] -14 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    What model came out in 2022? The newest I could find was the GT 1010 from 2021 (which is more of a video adapter than an actual graphics card) but that's the exception. The bulk of them came out in 2016 and 2017 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?f=architecture_Pascal

    Hate to break it to ya, but 2020 was 5 years ago. More than half of these GPUs lifespan ago. Nvidia is a for profit company, not your friend. You can't expect them to support every single product they've ever released forever. And they're still doing better than AMD in that regard.

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  • [–] 19 points 10 months ago* (3 children)

    You can't expect them to support every single product they've ever released forever. And they're still doing better than AMD in that regard.

    If nvidia had the pre-GSP cards' drivers opensourced at least there would be a chance of maintaining support. But nvidia pulled the plug.

    Intel's and AMD's drivers in the Mesa project will continue to receive support.

    For example, just this week: Phoronix: Linux 6.19's Significant ~30% Performance Boost For Old AMD Radeon GPUs These are GCN1 GPUs from 13yrs ago.

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  • [+] -13 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    thanks to work by Valve

    AMD did nothing to make their drivers better, Vale did.

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  • [–] 21 points 10 months ago

    Making them open to contributions was the first step, but ok I won't engage in this petty tribalism.

    The topic was about nvidia's closed source drives.

    Valve couldn't do the same for pascal GPUs. Nobody but nvidia has the reclocking firmware, so even the reverse engineered nouveau NVK drivers are stuck at boot clock speeds.

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  • [–] 11 points 10 months ago

    AMD did nothing to make their drivers better, Vale did.

    That's literally the point of open source though, both AMD and Intel rely on open source drivers, so anybody can fix a flaw they encounter without having to rely on the company to "consider allocating resources towards a fix for legacy hardware"

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  • [–] 24 points 10 months ago

    If they’re going to release things under a proprietary license and send lawyers after individuals just trying to get their hardware to work, then yes, yes I can.

    Don’t want to support it anymore? Fine. Open source it and let the community take over.

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    • [+] 67 points 10 months ago (2 children)
    [deleted]
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    • [–] 53 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    Here is old man me trying to fogure out what PASCAL code there is in the linux codebase, and how NVIDIA gets to drop it.

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    [–] 46 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (24 children)

    According to the Steam HW survey around 6% of users are still using Pascal (10xx) GPUs. That's about 8.4 million GPUs losing proprietary driver support. What a waste.

    GPU    %
1060    1.86
1050ti  1.43
1070    0.78
1050    0.67
1080    0.5
1080ti  0.38
1070ti  0.24

    Fixed: 1050 was noted as 1050ti

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (21 children)

    8.4 million GPUs losing proprietary driver support.

    Are they all on Linux though?

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (20 children)

    Are they supported longer on the windows driver?

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (14 children)

    Apparently? Title only mentions dropping the support on Linux. 🤷‍♂️

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (5 children)

    You don't have to updare your drivers though, isn't this normal with older hardware?

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  • [–] 7 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    You don't have to updare your drivers though.

    Not sure if you're on Windows or Linux but, on Linux, we have to actively take explicit actions not to upgrade something when we are upgrading the rest of our system. It takes more or less significant effort to prevent upgrading a specific package, especially when it comes in a sneaky way like this that is hard to judge by the version number alone.

    On Windows you'd be in a situation like "oh, I forgot to update the drivers for three years, well that was lucky."

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    It makes me wonder why the package still auto updates if it detects you're using the driver that would be removed, surely it could do some checks first?

    Would be vastly preferable to it just breaking the system.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (2 children)

    It would be a very out-of-scope feature for a Linux package manager to do a GPU hardware check and kernel module use check to compare whether you're using the installed driver, and then somehow detect in the downloaded, about-to-be-installed binary that this will indeed remove support for your hardware.

    It just seems very difficult to begin with, but especially not the responsibility of a general package manager as found on Linux.

    On Windows, surely the Nvidia software should perform this detection and prevent the upgrade. That would be its responsibility. But it's just not how it is done on Linux.

    It's not the package itself that "auto updates". The package manager just updates all the packages that have updates available, that's it.

    But still, the system doesn't really "break", all you have to do is downgrade the package, then add a rule preventing it from being updated until Nvidia/Arch package maintainers add a new package that has only that legacy driver'# latest version, which won't be upgraded again.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    If Linux is going to be usable by the average person on windows it needs to do something better than booting to a CLI and making the user figure out how to manually downgrade a package.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    Is it the goal of Linux to be usable by the average person? Just asking.

    I consider myself an average person. I'm a completely self-taught Linux user, until I learned a bunch more at uni, but that was a small fraction of what I know now and after I started using Linux.

    I just followed the installation guide and searched the internet when I couldn't figure something out myself, just like I expect from the average schmuck. Especially a gamer schmuck who might know a thing or two more than average average schmucks who barely use computers at all.

    You know what I mean? Like are we expecting Linux to do Windows levels of handholding?

    I know a lot of gamers who will happily drop into the firmware of their motherboard and tweak the timings of their RAM, but they can't expect to learn some command line commands? Read some documentation?

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    I believe the same SW version is packaged. Nvidia said they'd drop support in the 580 release, but they shifted it to 590 now.

    The arch issues are another layer of headache by the maintainers changing the package names and people breaking their systems on update when a non-compatible version is pulled replacing the one with still pascal support in it.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (6 children)

    Not really a problem of Arch, but of the driver release model, then, IMO. You'd have this issue on Windows too if you just upgraded blindly, right? It's Nvidia's fault for not naming their drivers, or versioning/naming them in a way that indicates support for a set of architectures. Not just an incrementing number willy nilly.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    It's 2025, can we not display a warning message in pacman? Or letting it switch from nvidia-590 to nvidia-legacy?

    I'm not an arch user, I admit, I don't like footguns.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    TIL Arch is a footgun. 🤡 cope. 😉

    But yeah, I agree, if package maintainers were astute there, a warning would've probably been good somehow. Not sure pacman supports pre-install warnings. Maybe? It does support warning about installing a renamed/moved package. But the naming would've had to be really weird for everyone involved if the warning would be clear in that case.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (1 child)

    I admit, all distros are a different degree of footguns, I'm saying this as a nix user. lol

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    Just as with anything you do in life, take action with a healthy side of precaution.

    This is a life lesson. I've learned to be careful around the oven. I've also learned to be careful running volatile commands. 😅

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    Windows doesnt drop to CLI and break if the graphics driver is missing. But also GPU driver updates are not forced on you just by updating the system.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago*

    Windows doesnt drop to CLI and break if the graphics driver is missing.

    Okay. Kind of a matter of definition of "breaking" but sure.

    But also GPU driver updates are not forced on you just by updating the system.

    Right. But on Linux they happen automatically when upgrading the rest of your system, is what I was saying.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    Windows doesn't force update your driver and remove support though, and even if it did it won't drop you to some CLI, it will still work.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago* (3 children)

    Rolling distros also only update when you tell them. It is the user who is pulling the trigger on the footgun in both cases.

    I'd say the main difference is that arch users are more trigger-happy about being up to date.

    Also, I think pacman should at least warn you if the problem is enough to warrant a post on the arch website.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Sorta, but you run one command to update everything at once, and even though the system knows what GPU you have it still seems to update the driver to one thats not compatible, instead of holding that update back.

    Also if it didn't warn the user when updating, the user had no idea they were pulling any trigger, especially when Linux falls back to CLI after this instead of just falling back to a basic driver.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    What you described is what happaned with arch. The transitioning shouldn't have happened this way, IMO.

    Other distros usually don't send their users to TTY after an update if they can help it.

    On the long term, the situation is the same on linux and windows: you choose the latest driver and live with that given feature set and its bugs.

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    • [+] 31 points 10 months ago (12 children)
    [deleted]
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  • [–] 18 points 10 months ago (10 children)

    I’m told AMD works better with Linux, but I haven’t tried it myself.

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  • [–] 17 points 10 months ago (7 children)

    AMD is plug and play on Linux. With my 7800XT there isn’t a driver to install. Only issue is that AMD doesn’t make anything that competes with the 5080/5090.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    Only "issue" is that AMD doesn’t make anything that competes with the 5080/5090.

    And do you really need the performance of a 5080? Certainly not that of a 5090.

    My 9070 XT runs everything I need at perfectly acceptable rates on maximum settings. AAA games among them.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago* (5 children)

    That’s such a bad way to look at it. I would’ve bought a 5090 if I could afford it because I want to hold onto the 5090 for almost a decade like I did with my 1080. Depending on prices, it doesn’t make sense to upgrade twice in 10 years because you bought a budget option, and then be stuck trying to sell a budget card. 5090s will hold their value for years to come. Good luck playing AAA titles maxed out in 5 years on a 7800XT.

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  • [–] 6 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    Generally, you'll get better results by spending half as much on GPUs twice as often. Games generally aren't made expecting all their players to have a current-gen top-of-the-line card, so you don't benefit much from having a top-of-the-line card at first, and then a couple of generations later, usually there's a card that outperforms the previous top-of-the-line card that costs half as much as it did, so you end up with a better card in the long run.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago*

    Yeah, I am looking at spending less than I did before though. But when will an under £200 card give like double the performance of a 2070? I don't want to spend that much for +20%. Unless my current card dies there is little reason to upgrade.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    Good luck playing AAA titles maxed out in 5 years on a 5080 too... 5090 isn't even considered a consumer card anyway, it's more like an enthusiast, collector's item. It's so expensive compared to its performance value.

    You have to look at performance-to-price ratio. That's the only metric that matters, and should determine how much you can sell it for when upgrading, and how often you upgrade.

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  • [–] 8 points 10 months ago

    Open source drivers are a major plus, I've had a much easier time than my partner on NVIDIA. I mean I make both machines work but the NVIDIA has been a real pig at times.

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