By @michaellarabel
Publication Date:
With the Arch Linux packages for the NVIDIA official graphics driver moving to the now-stable NVIDIA 590 driver series that drops the GeForce GTX 900 and GTX 1000 series GPU support, Arch Linux users with those old Maxwell and Pascal graphics cards will need to transition to using the NVIDIA legacy driver packages from the Arch Linux AUR. Meanwhile for those on Turing and newer with the NVIDIA 590 driver will enjoy the open-source kernel modules by default being used.
It’s been three and a half years since NVIDIA began publishing their official open-source kernel module sources. They remain out-of-tree but updated in-step with each new driver release. Those open-source kernel modules have evolved into being the default with the packaged NVIDIA Linux driver and for Blackwell GPUs is the only option for their official kernel driver with their prior closed-source kernel driver no longer being extended. That modern NVIDIA open-source kernel driver used by their official driver stack only supports RTX 20 “Turing” GPUs and newer due to depending upon the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP).
With the Pascal and older support now off to the legacy driver branch and NVIDIA R590 and latter being just for Turing and newer GPUs, the open-source kernel module can be assumed to be supported everywhere by the R590+ drivers. Thus Arch Linux with its NVIDIA driver packaging as of the R590 driver series is defaulting to using the open-source kernel module code.
The Arch Linux project
