[elrepo] NVIDIA is dropping support for G8xx, G9xx and GT2xx chipsets

[Phil Perry]

Hi folks,

Nvidia have just release a new short term driver release (version
343.22) which announces that support for G8xx, G9xx and GT2xx chipsets
is to be removed to a new legacy branch:

http://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/77844/en-us

[quote]
Removed support for G8x, G9x, and GT2xx GPUs, and motherboard chipsets
based on them. Ongoing support for new Linux kernels and X servers, as
well as fixes for critical bugs, will be included in 340.* legacy
releases through the end of 2019.
[/quote]

We don't currently build the short term releases, only the long term
branch, so this doesn't affect us immediately, but it does give us
notice that the next long term release is likely to drop support for
these chipsets. I suspect the current 340.xx branch will become the new
legacy release.

The reason this is important to us is that we currently have no sane way
to handle this situation within rpm/yum. We have no way to prevent a
user performing a 'yum update' to the latest driver only to find their
(older) hardware is no longer supported by the new driver.

We do have our 'nvidia-detect' utility which will warn of the
incompatibility for those that use it, but for those blindly performing
a 'yum update', even if we can detect the incompatibility we still have
no sane way to bail out of a yum transaction. E.g, even if we were to
call nvidia-detect during the rpm %pre script the yum transaction is
already underway.

So this thread is intended to firstly highlight the issue to help
prevent folks falling into this trap and also raise awareness so we can
help those recover who do fall victim.

Secondly, I'm open to suggestions if anyone has any ideas as to how we
can handle this situation more gracefully from within our package. ATM
I'm contemplating putting a warning in the first new release that
notifies users that support for the above chipsets has been dropped.

Finally, some time ago Maurits very generously donated a couple of
NVIDIA (G8400 and GT240) based card to ensure we could continue to test
the latest driver release. Unfortunately it looks like we will again be
in a position where we don't have any NVIDIA hardware that will support
the latest release. We don't like seeking donations but if anyone is
able to assist we would again be most grateful.

Phil

PS - if there are any users here who are active on Red Hat, CentOS or
Scientific Linux lists, it would be helpful if you could assist in
getting the message out to those users. Maybe we can wait until such a
release happens upstream, and we can certainly hold off releasing any
new driver packages until the word is out to help matters.