[elrepo] Next NVIDIA driver releases

[Phil Perry]

The next Long-Lived NVIDIA release will bring with it a few notable 
changes (note it's not been released yet):

1. It will drop support for older NVIDIA cards based on the Fermi chipset

2. It will drop support for 32-bit operating systems. This means no more 
i686 packages on el6.

Dropping support for older Fermi-based chipsets means those using these 
cards will need to stay on the current 390 series driver. To this end, I 
have forked the current 390.77 driver to a legacy nvidia-390xx driver, 
and uploaded packages to the testing repository (currently el7 only). If 
you have an older Fermi-based card, please would you test and report 
back if these packages work as expected (i.e, they should be 
functionally equivalent to the current 390.77 driver packages).

To test, please uninstall your current drivers, and install the new 
legacy packages:

yum erase kmod-nvidia
yum --enablerepo=elrepo-testing install kmod-nvidia-390xx
and reboot

Cards that will no longer be supported include GeForce 400, 500, some 
600 and some 700 cards (600 and 700 series cards use a mixture of older 
Fermi chipsets and newer Kepler chipsets)

There will be a newer version of nvidia-detect which will correctly 
identify cards requiring the new legacy 390xx driver, but for now you 
can still use nvidia-detect to determine the chipset your card is based 
upon. For example:

nvidia-detect -v
Probing for supported NVIDIA devices...
[10de:1287] NVIDIA Corporation GK208B [GeForce GT 730]
This device requires the current 390.67 NVIDIA driver kmod-nvidia

shows the above card as 'GK208B'. The first two letters identify the 
chipset, so GF = Fermi, GK = Kepler, GM = Maxwell, GP = Pascal. Anything 
beginning GF (Fermi-based) will no longer be supported and should switch 
to using the 390xx legacy driver. Thus we see the card above is based 
upon the Kepler chipset so will continue to be supported by the next 
Long-Lived driver release.

Our yum-plugin-nvidia will prevent anyone with an older card from 
accidentally updating to newer drivers that do not support their 
hardware and breaking their system, but they won't be getting updates 
applied to the 390xx legacy driver branch unless they switch to the 
legacy driver.