No proprietary driver for old nvidia cards?

[Dimitri John Ledkov]

Hi,

On Thu, 12 Oct 2023 at 15:44, Simon Chopin <simon.chopin at canonical.com> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Dominik came to me as he tested the Desktop image with an old nvidia
> graphics card (GTX 770), and the proprietary drivers for it weren't
> installed when running the nvidia test scenario on the ISO tracker,
> rather using the nouveau driver.
>
> IIRC for old hardware the relevant proprietary version is the 390, which
> appears not to be available in Mantic but was in Lunar.
>
> It's not a huge problem as the feature coverage of nouveau for old
> GPUs is pretty decent, however I'd like to know whether it was
> intentional, and if so, can someone mention that in the release notes?
>

Ubuntu ships the widest array of possible NVIDIA graphics driver
families, in every release as practically feasible.
It does come down to total number of drivers supported, the
cards/families support matrix, if nvidia supports the driver, and if
it can even build and work. We have a wider availability of drivers
when online.
Furthermore, on the ISO we require to only ship those drivers that are
signed and thus available to work out of the box on the secureboot
systems.
Multiple drivers are no longer compatible with v6.5+ kernel and will
not be available going forward.
If one is required to use 390 series of the driver, my only
recommendation is to remain on Jammy host, with v5.15 kernel.
Even when staying on jammy v5.15 there is strong chance that 390
drivers will stop being compatible with security updates of the kernel
itself. If that happens, one might be faced with ultimate dilema of
using vulnerable kernel or have working nvidia gpu.

Mantic ships with 9 NVIDIA driver series with the oldest one being 470.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-390/+bug/2035189
retired 4 nvidia drivers, and yes some of them have support for unique
EOL cards that are not otherwise supported by newer drivers.

I do not believe this is release note worthy, given each ubuntu
release removes many packages, and hardware support is continuously
added and removed. In the same way we don't list the hundreds of new
NVIDIA cards from current generations that Mantic now enables out of
the box.




--
okurrr,

Dimitri