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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You’re re-opening the microkernel vs monlithic kernel debate with that. For fun you can read how Andrew S. Tanenbaum and Linus Torvalds debated the question in 1992 here: https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/wlhw16QWltI
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.
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.
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.
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).
People love to say Linux is great for old hardware. But not 10 series Nvidia cards apparently?
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.
Well it still worked until this update, so few week old OS and driver was also good. It’s Arch so expect it to break. It will probably be fixable, we are Linux users.
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
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.
Pascal is coming up on 10 years old. You can’t expect companies to support things forever.
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.
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.
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.
That’s why I don’t like closed source proprietary. They decide to stop the support.
Make them open source the drivers so the community can do it then.
You are in an anarchist instance making the most elitist statement ever. Congratulations 👏🏼
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Nvidia was awful before the LLM craze, now they’re awful AND evil.
All capitalism is evil
“Brodie” mentioned. To be fair on the Arch side, they are clear the system could break with an update and you should always read the Arch news in case of manual intervention. You can’t fault Archlinux for users not following the instructions. This is pretty much what Arch stands for.
And IMO if anything this is Nvidia’s doing, arch is just being arch, like it sucks but I also don’t see a problem with arch in this instance.
Brodie
Thinking Forth was a great book! I’m surprised it came up here though.
I wasted days of my life getting nVidia to work on Linux. Too much stress. Screw that. Better ways to spend time. If I can’t game, that’s OK too.
I’m told AMD works better with Linux, but I haven’t tried it myself.
Open source drivers are a major plus, I’ve had a much easier time than my partner on NVIDIA. I mean I make both machines work but the NVIDIA has been a real pig at times.
The last time I updated my driver, BG3 didn’t start anymore. So I really could not care less about driver updates for my 8 years old card.
But still, fuck nvidia.
Sounds like it’s time to switch out the 1080ti for a 9070xt. Been almost 10 years, probably due for an upgrade.
I will miss having that CUDA compatibility on hand for matlab tinkering. I wonder if any translation layers are working yet?
I can’t believe they would do this to poor Borland. I guess I’ll just need to use an AMD GPU for my Turbo Pascal fun.
Getting dumped to CLI is just a standard Arch experience in updating anything isn’t it? You asked for it, you got it.
I really dodged a bullet upgrading from my 1070Ti to the last AMD (9070XT or I misremembered?) for the black Friday. Lowest price of the generation just before RAM’s price skyrocketed.
My SO is not so lucky…
Maybe we should use this card for under TV computers with Windows… sadly?
Pascal… Now there’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time… A long time
The 1060 is still hanging around ~2% usage on steam hardware survey, so it’s not completely irrelevant yet.
Delphi
Jeeez, lol
We never keep to the present. We anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does.
That’s why I’m not on bleeding edge.
Oh, haha I was confused for a second about the Pascal language 🤭
Just make 580 legacy. Problem solved. :) (It’s already LTS though)
By the way, I have GTX 1080 and this seems to be end of the way. What is the similar AMD I can get, preferably second hand?
Maybe the RX 7600 XT.
It’s in the second to latest generation (7000 not 9000), should be slightly faster than a GTX 1080, and doubles the VRAM capacity to 16 GB so you wouldn’t be in danger of running into limitations with that too soon.
Sounds nice but let me rephrase. What is the similar AMD card that I can get by selling GTX 1080 without adding too much. I’m not looking for an upgrade anytime soon.
I’ll switch to Debian if I must but I don’t want to do that either unless I have to.
Hard to say what the used market is like, but the cheapest cards that would be broadly similar in performance would probably be the Arc A580, RX 5700 or RX 6600. This page has some rankings that are reasonable for comparison: https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gpu-hierarchy,4388-2.html
But…surely there’s a way to just stick with the latest supported driver, right? Or is Arch truly an “upgrade or die” distro?
Thanks for the comparison. It seems RX 6600 seems the most suitable option since the second hand prices for 5700 and 6600 are quite close. Probably GTX 1080 can compensate most of it.
Well, currently I’ll have to switch the AUR driver and will have to stick to it for a while until I find a good candidate. I would expect them to make it at least legacy driver so we don’t have to hoop around though. It’s not usually like this but this is a big change (thanks Nvidia) and Arch team made a big change too, so usual update would break my system it would seem.
No idea, since I have no way of knowing how the second hand market around you looks like. I just looked for a similar (in performance) card, not of the newest gen so there would hopefully be some used models around.
I see, thanks for checking though. It seems I can sell GTX 1080 around 100$ here but RX 7600 XT is 320$ in second hand. Second hand market doesn’t seem bright here. Even RX 6600 is around 150$. That might work for me but I guess I’ll need to check a lot.
I haven’t noticed as I have zero NVidia GPUs among my computers and servers.
