Nvidia GPU 340 support

leewp14

Hi. I'm a new Solus user, just installed Solus a couple of days ago.
Updated my system yesterday and today realized that I need to install proprietary nvidia drivers as I got a system freeze after a few hours of usage. But the option to install nvidia-340.xx driver is not showing up in DoFlicky anymore.
Did some searching and found that Solus 4.1 moves to kernel 5.5 and drop nvidia 340 no longer has support.
So basically I have to use nouveau from now on? I'm ok with nouveau but well it has been freezing my system across all linux distros. I'm aware that turning off hardware acceleration solves the issue but it is unpractical.

I hope to get more information regarding this! I'm aware that it is nvidia's decision to drop support for new kernel. Is there any way like maybe switch to old kernel to regain 340 driver support? Or I have no choice but to either live with nouveau or stay on older Solus version?
I'm having Nvidia Quadro FX 1800M which uses the 340.xx driver.

Thanks and regards.

DataDrake

leewp14 As you've stated, we dropped 340 when it was no longer supported under kernel 5.5. Nouveau is the only option for those older cards.

leewp14

DataDrake Thanks for your reply. Meanwhile, I wonder if patches mentioned here could also be applied on solus? That would be great to regain proprietary driver support for older nvidia cards.
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvidia-graphics-drivers-340/+bug/1872950
https://aur.archlinux.org/cgit/aur.git/tree/?h=nvidia-340xx

*I see that there is also patches for linux 5.x in solus repo of nvidia 340, so I think it should be appropriate to patch the driver for linux 5.5 too?

**here's a complete patch: https://gitlab.com/snippets/1943779

DataDrake

leewp14 The patches we applied in the past have generally been to deal with lag in the time between when the kernels come out and when Nvidia finally update support in their drivers. This is a very different situation now because Nvidia have officially stated that they will not support kernels newer than 5.4 with 340. It's also different to when we deprecated 304 because it was no longer compatible with xorg-server. I'm sorry to hear that you were impacted by this, but we have already removed 340 and have no plans to reintroduce it.

leewp14

DataDrake Noted, thanks for the clarification! It's ok, like backbox's nouveau, it freezes after a long time of usage unlike other distro's nouveau that freezes in just a couple of minutes, not sure what's the reason. I think I will stick to Solus for the time being unless unbearable. Thanks!

WetGeek

leewp14 not sure what's the reason

Sounds like memory leaks.

leewp14

WetGeek Is there any way to determine if it is memory leak? Or do you have any references regarding this?

WetGeek

leewp14

Having chased down and fixed lots of memory leaks, the problem sounded familiar to me.

Here's a reference from WikiPedia:

leewp14

WetGeek I see, thanks. I guess there's not much I could do then?

WetGeek

leewp14 I guess there's not much I could do then?

It's not something that would be easy for a ordinary mortal. Or even for a lot of programmers, for that matter. It would probably make more sense to bring it to the attention of that application's developers.

There are development tools that help in identifying resource leaks by taking a snapshot of memory before running a program, then another snapshot of memory after the program has exited. Comparing the before and after snapshots can confirm that the problem exists, and how bad it is.

Figuring out what to change to stop it from happening can get a bit more complicated.

EDIT: Full disclosure ... my experience in fixing these is all with Windows executables and DLLs. If this description doesn't apply to Linux, someone please correct me.