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Comment by aninteger | Hacker News Reader

Given that it's Nvidia, no Linux support. That's the catch.

That's a strange statement. The vast vast majority of these cards will be in systems running Linux.

I for one suffer deeply when I try to install the nvidia drivers on Linux. The website binaries _always_ break my system

Only the ppas from graphics-drivers work properly

My experience on windows is much more automatic and it never breaks anything. But I'd rather pay the price (installing on Linux) to avoid windows at all costs

Yea it's not ideal but really no option is. Built in to Linux would be a problem too given the rate of GPU driver development. Most Linux installs in the corporate world are stuck on the major version of the kernel and system packages they shipped with.

If you installed the drivers using the PPAs, you can't then update using the NVIDIA-provided binaries without doing a very thorough purge, including deleting all dependent installs (CUDNN, CUBLAS, etc.)

I highly recommend sticking with one technique or the other; never intermix them.

All the AI software running on these data-centre chips is almost exclusively running on Linux.

I wish people would stop talking rubbish about NVIDIA's Linux support.

That's because nvidias linux support for consumers is indeed trash, while their creators/business/creatives software (eg CUDA) is not trash, but you mostly hear consumers trashing nvidia.

They don't make (relevant) money from consumer hardware on Linux.

Only FOSS zealots actually, the rest of us is quite ok with their binary drivers.

I thought that only applied to their consumer products.

Their consumer products have Linux support too, the catch is just that the drivers are proprietary binary blobs

Don't they provide Linux drivers for their gaming graphics cards too, just not open source?

Yes

No Linux support? Guess I'll have to keep using Solaris with my A4000!

Nvidia provides Linux drivers for their server chips.

Don't they provide them for their consumer cards too, just that it's a closed source binary blob?

And not just Linux: FreeBSD.

* https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/freebsd-x64-archiv...

* https://www.freshports.org/x11/nvidia-driver

Heck, Solaris:

* https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/solaris-display-ar...

* https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

CUDA and related software/libraries only work on Linux or Windows.

Some are even Linux only like nccl (AFAIK required to fully use NVLink)

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