Nvidia and Linux - what to expect here?

No I don’t care about passthrough no I’m not spending over 2 grand and yes I’m villing to wait for a Vega based laptop from AMD if it happens in 4-5 months. But at the moment Nvidia seems to be a good option. Heres the deal.

Been looking at hardware. I’m tired of not being able to run games and I’m tired of having to deal with older hardware. I’m thinking of doing a laptop. Yeah I had this ITX machine mapped out, but ATM thats looking like I’m not going to be able to use it as much as I thought. I’m just not as home as much. I’m out with friends or just not around. And you know, an X230T can only do so much.

So. Running linux, probably arch, what are my risks for using nvidia? I’m looking at 1060 6GB and up based laptops. MSI GS65, oryx pro, quality machines that are portable. The frame is irrelevant as I have my shortlist.

What is the driverscape like? The last time I did anything with nvidia cards in linux, if I did anything with the kernel, at all, dead. The drivers are just gone or not attached. And there wasn’t much I could do about it aside from reinstall and hope that those minor system updates didn’t fuck me. Even on ubuntu, in fact.

If I update, say from 4.18 to 4.20, is the system going to freak out and black screen? What am I going to have to deal with?

Also I made this:

Pretty sure that’s still the status quo.

Nvidia do not have open drivers, and linux does not have an ABI they can use. Until that situation changes, the kernel upgrade breaking nvidia driver shit (unless you recompile the stub driver or whatever it is - it’s been a while) will continue.

If you can wait, AMD is the way to go if you care about fairly seamless kernel upgrades IMHO (and if you’re a linux user who wants working 3d without this bullshit, i’d try to support AMD on principle as well - at least until Nvidia change course).

Hey mods stop touching my thread.

If your looking to game, I wouldn’t bother with a laptop…which is going to add it’s own challenges with the need for Nvidia Optimus.

As far as black screens with kernel updates, I think it has more to do with what distro you’re using than the driver. If the driver supports the kernel version, there shouldn’t be a problem. I update my kernel with every kernel release. I just need to re-emerge the driver after I compile the kernel.

Currently using kernel 4.19.1 with nvidia driver 410.73

I get your sentiment, I really do, I’m just not going to be at home a lot. And hell, I come from laptops. Its nothing new to me that there are limitations.

I’m not a nvidia user, I don’t even know how to do that.

It’s not an Nvidia thing, it’s a Gentoo thing. After kernel updates, the driver needs to be reinstalled, which compiles a new module using the kernel sources of the current kernel. I also need to do the same thing with virtualbox modules.

No one is touching anything except for yourself.

To what are you referring to?

Which drivers? Proprietary ones work fine and dkms usually compiles the kernel modules on kernel updates (except when it doesn’t…). Nouveau is another story.

The biggest issue that plagues the Nouveau driver with modern NVIDIA hardware and really hurts its potential adoption is the lack of re-clocking support.
[…]
For GeForce GTX 600/700 “Kepler” graphics cards there is manual re-clocking support that has been stable for a while now in the kernel
[…]
At this stage, Nouveau doesn’t have any dynamic/automatic re-clocking for their GPUs to switch frequencies based upon GPU utilization.
[…]
The Maxwell GeForce GTX 900 and Pascal GeForce GTX 1000 series still do not have proper re-clocking support in the Nouveau driver due to the shift to signed firmware images. While NVIDIA released the necessary signed firmware images to Nouveau developers to support hardware acceleration on Maxwell/Pascal, right now it’s still stuck to the boot clock frequencies that are very low compared to their advertised clock speeds.
[…]
the aging GeForce GTX 600/700 series remain the best supported discrete GPUs right now for the Nouveau driver.

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=nouveau-summer-2018&num=1

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Nouveau-XDC2017

The Nvidia drivers complain when the GCC version is mismatched with the version of GCC that the kernel was compiled with. Drivers will fail to install if the DKMS module can’t be built.

And bear in mind it is EXTREMELY sensitive to version numbers of GCC. If you’re using Ukuu, those kernels don’t really disclose which GCC version is used to compile the kernel, so if you have a mismatch, you won’t know until the driver is being installed.

The proprietary ones are the ones I normally have problems with.

Use a distribution that packages and ships Nvidia’s drivers that it tests against the kernel it packages and ships.

Follow the distribution’s recommended method for installing the drivers.

Know how to boot using the last previous working kernel/driver combination if you run into trouble. This is usually done by making a selection at the grub boot menu. Some distros set that display up by default, some don’t.

Both deb and rpm systems allow individual packages to be excluded from updates by editing a config file. (Don’t know about Arch.) You could excluded both kernel and driver, or one or the other, then update manually update when you know a new release has not caused problems.

Stay with “LTS” drivers from Nvidia.

My own experience says using Nvidia’s drivers is more reliable than it used to be but much depends on the distribution’s approach to those drivers.

As pointed out, the basic issue is the kernel and the Nvidia drivers are developed independently and out of sync with each other. So, if there’s something incompatible in a new version of either, it may not become visible before release.

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I believe this is the complaint… kernel upgrades break the installed driver unless you remember to recompile it…

You can go through all these caveats (and i did for years) and stick to kernel versions that nvidia’s driver works against… or you can just use the AMD hardware with mainline kernel support.

If you don’t yet have a card and it will be used primarily in linux… go AMD. Your life will be easier.

2c.

The only reason I’d now buy Nvidia for Linux is if i was buying a Titan or 1080TI and up. If you’re looking to buy a performance tier that AMD has available (i.e., Vega/GTX1080 tier or below), buying AMD will just be easier for linux.

If you want something faster than that then you need to weigh up whether the driver hassles are worth it.

Not all laptops have optimus.

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