Video cards and drivers

[metux]

Hello folks,

I'd like to start making a list of graphics hardware and drivers that are supporting them. Therefore we need to collect some real world data.
My main points of interest here are:

a) many server mainboards seem to have old GPUs onboard and so still using old drivers
b) some HW meanwhile also works with generic modesetting driver and might not need special drivers anymore
c) Nvidia cards: some running fine with free drivers, some still need the ugly proprietary one

Feel free report working constellations (that haven't been listed yet) here.

[metux]

@callmetango

[callmetango]

@metux I think it was good to specify what should be reported in what form. At best make an example which data to provide.

[metux]

feel free to fix it ;-)

What we finally need to know is a list of cards (or mainboards) out there and which driver(s) can support them.

[SuperDuperDeou]

NVIDIA user here.

As far as OS drivers go, the situation is complicated: for the in-tree kenrel drivers, there are Noveou driver, and the Nova, the latter only for Turing (RTX 2000/GTX 1600) and later, and noveou is essentially getting phased out for the Nova-capable cards, so, XLibre would need a Nova driver, but Nova is still in the early stages of getting upstreamed.

For the out of tree drivers, we have Nvidia proprietary up to Ada Lovelace (RTX 4000), and Nvidia proprietary with open kernel module for Turing (RTX 2000/GTK 1600) and later. These are the only drivers that support CUDA, so, anyone who bought an Nvidia card specifically for CUDA (there are several use cases even on the desktop) has no choice but to run these drivers even if the Nova/Noveou-NVK stack ends up being phenomenal. XLibre would need to support these drivers as well.

For the current XLibre drivers, the proprietary ones work well enough on my machine (RTX 4060ti), I don't know how to try the generic modesetting drivers yet.

[stefan11111]

So it works without glamor. What about mpv?

[SuperDuperDeou]

MPV has no issues drawing with drm on the TTY. (It errors out inside an X session and --vo=drm, but I think that's expected)

[SuperDuperDeou]

I've tried nvidia-proprietary, and it has the same behavior.

I also tried xlibre-xf86-video-nouveau, but XLibre skips over it because the driver declares it works only up to GTX 10 series.

Also, the pacman package mirror just updated, so I got the chance to retry nouveau+modesetting with the segfault fixed. It boots with glamor enabled (using Zink, because there's no native OpenGL implementation on the nouveau stack for Turing and later), but in a black screen with the mouse cursor. It works by disabling glamor.

[stefan11111]

I was finally able to reproduce this.
Apparently nvidia needs something like this patch for glamor to work: https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/xorg/xserver/-/merge_requests/751
This is where I found out about it: https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/510.39.01/README/gbm.html
I will look into this a bit more.
This is a problem on Xorg too.
@metux What do you think about porting the patch from above?

[stefan11111]

@SuperDuperDeou @metux
I ported that patch and can confirm that this now works.
I opened a pr here: X11Libre/xserver#373

@SuperDuperDeou can you build that pr and report back whether or not it works for you?
You have to add `Option "Debug" "dmabuf_capable" to ServerFlags for this to work.

[metux]

Created a wiki page:
https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/wiki/Graphics-devices-&-drivers

[AmerXz]

as for legacy gpus (Kepler and older) there is a link from nvidia which has a list of legacy GPUs from 470 to 71.86 drivers

I actually doubt that there are still people who needs older than 340 or at most older than 304 drivers anyway

Here's the link for reference : https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/legacy-gpu/

[ONykyf]

ATI Radeon HD 5700 works with radeon (from xf86-video-ati), but only with --disable-glamor.

Most of a log (all relevant lines) for a segfault with --enable-glamor is here

Looks like nobody has succeeded with glamor in XLibre?

[stefan11111]

Could you also do p *f when this division by 0 happens?

[callmetango]

Could you please open a bug report for this at https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/new?template=01-bug-report.yml ? Otherwise the information gets lost. Thank you!

[ONykyf]

Could you please open a bug report for this at https://github.com/X11Libre/xserver/issues/new?template=01-bug-report.yml ? Otherwise the information gets lost. Thank you!

It's already there: X11Libre/xserver#347

Just the discussion has moved here somehow :)

[callmetango]

I understand and kindly ask you to discuss the issue there.

[metux]

wait ... the bug report shows SEGFAULT, but the debugger showed arithmetic error - something's not really fitting up here.

[ONykyf]

To start a wm was enough. I'll try later, had to go. чт, 10 лип. 2025, 16:30 користувач stefan11111 ***@***.***> пише:

…

Could you also do p *f when this division by 0 happens? — Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#99 (reply in thread)>, or unsubscribe <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/BG4XGZHUKZF3D7W7NQE72YT3HZTGXAVCNFSM6AAAAACARTKNQ2VHI2DSMVQWIX3LMV43URDJONRXK43TNFXW4Q3PNVWWK3TUHMYTGNZSGA4TKNY> . You are receiving this because you were mentioned.Message ID: ***@***.***>

[ONykyf]

Does anyone have a success story with the legacy nvidia-390 driver? Is it quite impossible to have it with drm on >=6.12 kernels? Are there some patchsets that allow to compile and use this with XLibre?

[stefan11111]

What happens if you try to build/run the nvidia-390 driver?
I have a gtx 1050, does the 390 driver work with that, so I can test it?

[stefan11111]

I tried building those drivers now, and the issue seems to be not with xlibre, but with the driver code being written for an older kernel:

/var/tmp/portage/x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-390.157/work/kernel/common/inc/nv-mm.h:164:23: error: too many arguments to function 'get_user_pages_remote'; expected 6, have 7
  164 |                return get_user_pages_remote(tsk, mm, start, nr_pages, flags,
      |                       ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
  165 |                                             pages, vmas);
      |                                                    ~~~~
./include/linux/mm.h:2477:6: note: declared here
 2477 | long get_user_pages_remote(struct mm_struct *mm,
      |      ^~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The drivers can probably be patched.

[ONykyf]

A lot of build errors (in particular related to GCC14 and GCC15). I had fixed some with patches (my own and collected on the Internet), and finally gave up. I think that somebody has done this work already.

Maybe some Arch-ers?

Would be nice if You try.

[stefan11111]

The werrors aren't just from gcc 14/15, they are explicitly passed:

-Werror=date-time -Werror=incompatible-pointer-types -Werror=designated-init

I have a patched gcc15 which turns -fpermissive on by default, and the build still fails.

[ONykyf]

I did it! Merged SlackBuild with Arch PKGBUILD for nvidia390 with the patches from the latter. Everything was built and installed smoothly, and voila! black screen after reboot even in text mode :D It seems that nvidia-drm does not work with kernels >= 6.10.

Don't know even if nvidia without drm can have any advantages over nouveau or modesetting.

[AmerXz]

patches for nvidia 390 exists in nvidia-390xx-dkms aur

check this link

[ONykyf]

patches for nvidia 390 exists in nvidia-390xx-dkms aur

check this link

It is exactly where I have got them.

Yes, efifb is used at the early boot, never did anything with it.

[ONykyf]

@AmerXz @metux @stefan11111 @callmetango
nvidia390 may be considered partially working https://github.com/ONykyf/nvidia390-slackbuild/, would be nice of someone had ideas on how to resolve the remaining issues.

[ONykyf]

@AmerXz @SuperDuperDeou @metux @callmetango
Now I can say that nVidia GTX 560 + nvidia390 driver work completely:
X11Libre/xserver#658 (comment)

out of the box if X11Libre/xserver#658 is applied.

[ONykyf]

Updated https://github.com/ONykyf/nvidia390-slackbuild respectively

[metux]

@ALL:

just talked to chatgpt, and here's what he told me about nvidia compatibility.
anybody, feel free to update our wiki from that:

https://chatgpt.com/share/68a36853-8728-8005-bb25-b982c8c514ee

[ONykyf]

@metux
Interesting indeed, but I'd not agree with
Fermi (400 / 500) (GTX460, GTX560Ti, GTX580)
390.xx (legacy)
🟢 Good daily driver (3D + video accel)
✅ Use nouveau (proprietary 390 is frozen)

Nouveau has glitches and lags, after having switched to 390.157 GTX560 works perfectly and does not even argue with integrated intel card. With nouveau, I had to choose: either 2 monitors, or 1 monitor + tv. Now with nvidia390 I have 2 monitors + tv on a separate seat, no lags and artifacts.

I'd rather advice chatgpt to update its info :)

[AmerXz]

470.xx (legacy, still receiving fixes for now)

Last branch supporting Kepler GPUs (GeForce 600 / 700 series).

Example cards: GTX 680, GTX 770, GT 730 (Kepler variant).

---

Just a side note:
Actually the last nvidia 470 version available is 470.256.02 released in june/04/2024 and nvidia didn't release any security update for the 470 branch adter that (As a user of nvidia kepler gpu which uses the 470 branch I can still get the latest linux kernel e.g 6.16 with some community patches)