I can’t believe they would do this to poor Borland. I guess I’ll just need to use an AMD GPU for my Turbo Pascal fun.
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.
“Brodie” mentioned. To be fair on the Arch side, they are clear the system could break with an update and you should always read the Arch news in case of manual intervention. You can’t fault Archlinux for users not following the instructions. This is pretty much what Arch stands for.
And IMO if anything this is Nvidia’s doing, arch is just being arch, like it sucks but I also don’t see a problem with arch in this instance.
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.
I just replaced my old 1060 with a Radeon 6600 rx myself.
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.
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.
People buy Nvidia for different reasons, but not everyone faces any issues with it in Linux, and so they see no reason to change what they’re already familiar with.
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.
It’s a good way for people to learn about fully hostile companies to the linux ecosystem.
Similar for me. All the talk about what software Linux couldn’t handle, I didn’t learn that Linux hates 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 sodoku 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.
Linux hates Nvidia
got that backwards
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).
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.
That’s fine and dandy until you need to do ML, there is no other option
I successfully ran local Llama with llama.cpp and an old AMD GPU. I’m not sure why you think there’s no other option.
Amd had approximately 1 consumer gpu with rocm support so unless your framework supports opencl or you want to fuck around with unsupported rocm drivers then you’re out of luck. They’ve completely failed to meet the market
He tried to warn y’all…
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Pascal is coming up on 10 years old. You can’t expect companies to support things forever.
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.
That’s why I don’t like closed source proprietary. They decide to stop the support.
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.
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.
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.
thanks to work by Valve
AMD did nothing to make their drivers better, Vale did.
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.
My son was going to switch to Linux this week. He has a GTX 1060.
Nouveau might be good enough by now for most games that will run on a 1060, maybe worth a try.
Am I the only one that can’t manage to make their Nvidia GTX 1060 run correctly on Linux? It has way worse performance than on Windows, even with the proprietary drivers.
I’ve tried both Kubuntu and Linux Mint.
I guess he can’t say he uses arch btw
It’s not that bad as I understand it. If you are using arch with a Pascal GPU you can switch to the legacy proprietary branch. https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-driver-drops-pascal-support-main-packages-switch-to-open-kernel-modules/
He wants to use Mint. This is what is called planned obsolescence. I say what Linus Torvalds says.
Might be able to use Mint Debian Edition.
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fuck. I just realised I have a pascal NVIDIA card on my laptop.
I’m running debian 13, wtf do I do?
EDIT : seems ok?
It was expected that the Linux Driver support will end with the GPU driver branch 580 as well, but NVIDIA extended this to branch 590 (it jumped straight from branch 580 to 590 and a single v580 Linux GPU driver exists). So, if you are boasting any of these GPUs, you won’t be getting Game Ready drivers that offer day-one game support and optimizations for the upcoming titles. However, there should be no issue in using them for how long you wish. Still, users should keep an eye on the quarterly updates as these are essential.
580 is LTS tho, you’ll get security patches for a fee years at least
Nothing. You run Debian. It’ll keep working at least until Debian 14. Possibly even after.
😎🤓
Take that, bleeding edge. 🤪
I really dodged a bullet upgrading from my 1070Ti to the last AMD (9070XT or I misremembered?) for the black Friday. Lowest price of the generation just before RAM’s price skyrocketed.
My SO is not so lucky…
Maybe we should use this card for under TV computers with Windows… sadly?
I’m running PopOS and Debian with Nvidia cards that should be affected by this, if I’m understanding this right. Ugh.
What a pain.
Nah, you’re in pop and Debian, you’ll be fine for a while.
Yes indeed, this happened to my coworker yesterday and it took them an hour to get everything fixed. This is not OK.
Nah, the distro that openly says updates may cause breakages and to check if you need manual intervention before updating following their long established normal procedure is fine.
Pascal… Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time… A long time
Delphi
Jeeez, lol
The 1060 is still hanging around ~2% usage on steam hardware survey, so it’s not completely irrelevant yet.
We never keep to the present. We anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does.
I haven’t noticed as I have zero NVidia GPUs among my computers and servers.
