[mythtv-users] Nvidia drop support for more 'legacy' GPUs

[Larry Finger]

On 11/25/2014 06:05 PM, Tony Gould wrote:
> this doesn't sound great. What does it mean for in terms of what I can or can't
> do? My main machine has ubuntu 12.04 with latest mythbuntu fixes/0.27 and
> onboard GeForce 8200. I also have an old asus pundit ph2 running debian wheezy
> with a GeForce 6150 (I was hoping to try some simple changes to the latest
> source code on this machine).
>
> Am I prevented in upgrading my o/s? Or in trying out some features of mythtv?
> Thanks if anyone can explain -- it's not obvious to me why it's so bad.
> (Ironically I always bought NVidia hardware because I thought it was
> linux-friendly).

I have a GeForce 7025 for which support was dropped several years ago. All that 
means for me is that my driver remains at version 304.131. For this card nouveau 
has never worked, thus I have to use the NVidia driver.

As I cannot download a package for my hardware from any repos available for my 
distro (openSUSE 42.2), I have to recompile the driver every time my kernel gets 
updated. You will likely need to do the same for whatever driver version NVidia 
has called EOL for the 8200. If you end up with a kernel with API changes that 
require patches to the driver, they are generally available someplace on the 
Web, and not difficult to install. For my kernel (4.4.59), no patches are required.

NVidia hardware has been generally friendly for Linux; however, recent support 
for Intel graphics hardware using driver i915 is now better. The main reason is 
that Intel is participating in i915 development, whereas NVidia refuses to help 
in development of nouveau.

Losing support for your legacy hardware is not ideal, but it is not the end of 
the world.

Larry