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NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux (hackaday.com)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/linux@programming.dev
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[–] 73 points 8 months ago (3 children)

Those are the GPUs they were selling — and a whole lot of people were buying — until about five years ago. Not something you'd expect to suddenly be unsupported. I guess Nvidia must be going broke or something, they can't even afford to maintain their driver software any more.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago* (2 children)

    I don’t get what needs support, exactly. Maybe I’m not yet fully awake, which tends to make me stupid. But the graphics card doesn’t change. The driver translates OS commands to GPU commands, so if the target is not moving, changes can only be forced by changes to the OS, which puts the responsibility on the Kernel devs. What am I missing?

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  • [–] 46 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates. The old Nvidia driver is not open source or free software, so nobody other than Nvidia themselves can practically or legally do it. Nvidia could of course change that if they don't want to do even the bare minimum of maintenance.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (3 children)

    The driver needs to interface with the OS kernel which does change, so the driver needs updates.

    That’s a false implication. The OS just needs to keep the interface to the kernel stable, just like it has to with every other piece of hardware or software. You don’t just double the current you send over USB and expect cable manufacturers to adapt. As the consumer of the API (which the driver is from the kernel’s point of view) you deal with what you get and don’t make demands to the API provider.

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  • [–] 27 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Device drivers are not like other software in at least one important way: They have access to and depend on kernel internals which are not visible to applications, and they need to be rebuilt when those change. Something as huge and complicated as a GPU driver depends on quite a lot of them. The kernel does not provide a stable binary interface for drivers so they will frequently need to be recompiled to work with new versions of linux, and then less frequently the source code also needs modification as things are changed, added to, and improved.

    This is not unique to Linux, it's pretty normal. But it is a deliberate choice that its developers made, and people generally seem to think it was a good one.

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  • [+] -6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    They have access to and depend on kernel internals

    That sounds like a stupid idea to me. But what do I know? I live in the ivory tower of application development where APIs are well-defined and stable.

    Thanks for explaining.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    I don't generally disagree, but

    You don’t just double the current you send over USB and expect cable manufacturers to adapt

    That's pretty much how we got to the point where USB is the universal charging standard: by progressively pushing the allowed current from the initially standardized 100 mA all the way to 5 A of today. A few of those pushes were just manufacturers winging it and pushing/pulling significantly more current than what was standardized, assuming the other side will adapt.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    The default standard power limit is still the same as it ever was on each USB version. There's negotiation that needs to happen to tell the device how much power is allowed, and if you go over, I think over current protection is part of the USB spec for safety reasons. There's a bunch of different protocols, but USB always starts at 5V, and 0.1A for USB 2.0, and devices need to negotiate for more. (0.15A I think for USB 3.0 which has more conductors)

    As an example, USB 2.0 can signal a charging port (5V / 1.5A max) by putting a 200 ohm resistor across the data pins.

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    The default standard power limit is still the same as it ever was on each USB version

    Nah, the default power limit started with 100 mA or 500 mA for "high power devices". There are very few devices out there today that limit the current to that amount.

    It all begun with non-spec host ports which just pushed however much current the circuitry could muster, rather than just the required 500 mA. Some had a proprietary way to signal just how much they're willing to push (this is why iPhones used to be very fussy about the charger you plug them in to), but most cheapy ones didn't. Then all the device manufacturers started pulling as much current as the host would provide, rather than limiting to 500 mA. USB-BC was mostly an attempt to standardize some of the existing usage, and USB-PD came much later.

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    A USB host providing more current than the device supports isn't an issue though. A USB device simply won't draw more than it needs. There's no danger of dumping 5A into your 20 year old mouse because it defaults to a low power 100mA device. Even if the port can supply 10A / 5V or something silly, the current is limited by the voltage and load (the mouse).

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago (1 child)

    Well, the original comment was about "pushing more current through than the spec", and that's pretty much what we did...

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  • [–] 2 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Well, regardless, the spec only cares about devices drawing more current than the host can supply, and that has always been consistent. Electricity doesn't really work in a way the host can "push" current, the only way it could do that would be with a higher voltage, which would damage anything not designed for it. But that's what the USB-PD spec is for, negotiating what voltage to supply, up to 48V now.

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

    Electricity doesn’t really work in a way the host can “push” current

    On a basic level this is precisely how electricity works, a power supply literally pushes electrons by creating a difference in electric field magnitude between two points; or, in other words, by applying an electromotive force to electrons; or, in other words, by creating a voltage between two points. A load then does something with those electrons that usually creates an opposing electric field, be it heating a wire, spinning a motor, or sustaining a chemical reaction within a battery. The amount of power produced by the source and released at the load is proportional to (voltage) * (number of electrons being pushed by the supply per unit of time); usually, this is the limiting factor for most power supplies. They can hold a steady voltage until they have to push too many electrons, then the voltage starts dropping.

    Edit: I see what you mean now. Yeah, for a given voltage, it is the load that determines the current, so there's no safety issue with this for the load. However there could be issues with the cables. IIRC there was an issue with noise being introduced by higher current draws that meant you couldn't charge and transfer data at the same time with some cables.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    Using 10 year old hardware with 10 year old drivers on 10 year old OS require no further work.

    The hardware doesn't change, but the OS do.

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  • [–] 3 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    Nvidia isn't exactly broke...I thought they were the most valuable company in the world? Or the second, sometimes they trade places with Apple

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  • [–] 1 point 8 months ago

    Poor Nvidia... the AI bubble is going to burst, the gamer market has all kinds of reasons to hate them now, and all they'll have to console themselves with is several trillion dollars.

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  • [+] -26 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Pascal is coming up on 10 years old. You can't expect companies to support things forever.

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  • [–] 35 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    They started 9 years ago, but they remained popular into 2020 and according to wikipedia the last new pascal model was released in 2022. The 1080 and the 1060 are both still pretty high up on the Steam list of the most common GPUs.

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  • [+] -16 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    What model came out in 2022? The newest I could find was the GT 1010 from 2021 (which is more of a video adapter than an actual graphics card) but that's the exception. The bulk of them came out in 2016 and 2017 https://www.techpowerup.com/gpu-specs/?f=architecture_Pascal

    Hate to break it to ya, but 2020 was 5 years ago. More than half of these GPUs lifespan ago. Nvidia is a for profit company, not your friend. You can't expect them to support every single product they've ever released forever. And they're still doing better than AMD in that regard.

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago* (1 child)

    You can't expect them to support every single product they've ever released forever. And they're still doing better than AMD in that regard.

    If nvidia had the pre-GSP cards' drivers opensourced at least there would be a chance of maintaining support. But nvidia pulled the plug.

    Intel's and AMD's drivers in the Mesa project will continue to receive support.

    For example, just this week: Phoronix: Linux 6.19's Significant ~30% Performance Boost For Old AMD Radeon GPUs These are GCN1 GPUs from 13yrs ago.

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  • [+] -14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

    thanks to work by Valve

    AMD did nothing to make their drivers better, Vale did.

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  • [–] 22 points 8 months ago

    Making them open to contributions was the first step, but ok I won't engage in this petty tribalism.

    The topic was about nvidia's closed source drives.

    Valve couldn't do the same for pascal GPUs. Nobody but nvidia has the reclocking firmware, so even the reverse engineered nouveau NVK drivers are stuck at boot clock speeds.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago

    AMD did nothing to make their drivers better, Vale did.

    That's literally the point of open source though, both AMD and Intel rely on open source drivers, so anybody can fix a flaw they encounter without having to rely on the company to "consider allocating resources towards a fix for legacy hardware"

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  • [–] 25 points 8 months ago

    If they’re going to release things under a proprietary license and send lawyers after individuals just trying to get their hardware to work, then yes, yes I can.

    Don’t want to support it anymore? Fine. Open source it and let the community take over.

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