NVIDIA's v580 Driver Branch Ends Support for Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPUs

[unix_joe]

"NVIDIA has confirmed that its upcoming 580 driver series will be the final release to offer official updates for three of its older GPU architectures. In a recent update to its UNIX graphics deprecation schedule, the company noted that once version 580 ships, Maxwell-, Pascal-, and Volta-based products will no longer receive new drivers or patches. Although this announcement originates from NVIDIA's UNIX documentation, the unified driver codebase means Windows users will face the same cutoff."

https://www.techpowerup.com/338497/nvid ... volta-gpus

This affects P-series laptops as recent as the P72/P52, T470p, and T480/T580 with dedicated graphics.

580 driver is not the current version yet, but will be soon. Eventually it will enter extended support (security patches only), but over time there will be enough ABI breakage that one would need to use a very old kernel to keep using the binary nvidia driver. I expect that the next couple versions of Debian (Trixie, Forky) are fine, which means another five years minimum, and everything after that would be a crapshoot.

FreeBSD support goes back to nvidia 304 because of the way they do things over there, meaning they can still use 20 year old nvidia cards, so that's probably the better long-term solution for these laptops once they hit double digits in age.

There's also the nouveau driver, but it's severely limited in what it is allowed to do.

Sucks for my daily laptop, but Windows 11 was not supported anyway, and with Debian it's still got some life left in it.

What really sucks is the people who's laptops supported Windows 11 (P72 series) but will be end of life early because of nvidia.