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

[Steve Cleveland]

I just want to chime in and let you all know how much I appreciate the 
work you do on this.  nVidia doesn't make things easy in this regard.

I like your approach to this point.  It would be great to have some time 
in testing with an updated nvidia-detect and the new driver release when 
it's available.  I'm not sure I have any newer hardware at this point, 
but I can probably get something to test with.

  - Steve

On 9/23/2014 2:50 AM, Phil Perry wrote:
> 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.
>
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