I’m really looking forward to this update, and it seems like Fedora has been using it for months already. Meanwhile, openSUSE is still on version 550. This means we can’t take advantage of Plasma’s explicit synchronization under Wayland, which was introduced with Plasma 6.1 a few months back.
Here’s what I’ve tried before reaching out:
Attempted to install the driver using the .run file – that was a nightmare, never again.
Used a package from the OBS repo, which worked, but I’m hesitant to depend on an unofficial package that might stop being maintained.
Tried the CUDA repo, but it didn’t go well and I had to roll back using Snapper.
So, the question is: when will Nvidia driver 560 be available in Tumbleweed’s official Nvidia repo, so I can update it easily with a simple zypper dup?
Redditors all seem to agree that it’s high time the 560 driver finally arrives for Tumbleweed:
I saw a comment a while back regarding this, stating it was simply not possible to have implement or maintain 2 different branches.
The question though is why follow the production branch at all? If Tumbleweed is the test bed for new things, doesn’t it make more sense to follow the new feature branch?
For me it feels like there is a discrepancy the rolling forward idea of tumbleweed yet the NVIDIA drivers follow the conservative approach of leap.
Like you I have seen a lot of people ask for the 560 drivers and like you I also tried the “hard way”, but I have yet to see any real interaction with the community if the current stance on Nvidia driver installation is still the current stance or if it should be changed.
It would be great if the community could actually have a discussion about this.
After all, Suse made it perfectly clear recently that this is a community distribution and not part of Suse. So if the community prefers to do it a different way, should it not be free to do so? (I am just assuming Suse’s interest play a role in the conservative approach here. No evidence to back this up, it just seems to make sense.)
I mean, the production branch makes sense for Slowroll and Leap, but not for Tumbleweed.
Sure. Get in touch with NVIDIA and either obtain permissions to redistribute their drivers or agreement to publish drivers that you prepare and start providing the latest and the greatest. That is what “community work” amounts to - not complaining that you do not get what you want.
Well, you obviously did not get the point I was trying to get across.
So let me try to be more clear, hoping it was my bad communication skills that failed here.
Firstly, even if I do what you suggest and actually succeed, there is no guarantee Opensuse would actually implement it.
Secondly, Opensuse clearly has an agreement in place, so why would I go out and get one.
Thirdly, Going out and doing whatever I want by myself is totally the opposite of community and working together to achieve a common goal.
Lastly, I was not even complaining about not getting the 560 driver. Sure I would like to have it, but it was not my main point.
My point is simply that there obviously is a request within the community to rollout the 560 driver. Or better yet, the new feature branch of the Nvidia driver.
A request shared by any people. Which is clear by all questions around this both here and on the official reddit.
Yet I have not seen any official statement, or better yet, a discussion around this.
No explanation why we can’t have the new feature branch.
No poll if we should switch.
Nothing…
So how are people going to interact or step op if there is no clarity on the situation.
If the answer is that more maintainers are needed, than sure someone can step up. But at least say that and say what help is needed with as not everyone is a developer of package maintainer.
Although I greatly prefer Opensuse over Fedora at least they discuss this openly and everybody can see these discussion going on.
Now if this discussion has been held in Opensuse than please correct me and point me to the source where I can follow this discussion, because I have looked for it.
Totally agreed with everything you said @The_Istar , this is also how I see the current state of openSUSE and it saddens me alot. I keep asking openSUSE on every platform I can: OBS, bugzilla, reddit, matrix, irc, discord etc… and it seems if I’m asking for a blueprint of Pentagon, because we - the COMMUNITY - don’t get any kind of straight answer. Don’t get me wrong, I know openSUSE is free, and God be my judge, but at this point I’d even pay for Tumbleweed, for better support, if financial background is what they need.
Disagreed with this statement @arvidjaar , then how does Fedora already have Nvidia 560 for months now? Because they have better/stronger connections with Nvidia and openSUSE doesn’t - period.
Moving onwards with my thoughts: Imho, it’s abnormal that we have Plasma 6.1 for what 2months now, and still we can’t benefit from wayland + explicit sync because we’re stuck with 550, which is anything but usable at this point. I’m a gamer, and I need up to date drivers. I can’t stand the screen tearing under X11, and its jankyness. At least provide us some official way to install 560 for testing purposes.
Sorry for losing my temper, but this helplessness is just driving me crazy.
Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes! This 100% well said and I agree with every single word.
I think it’s safe to say, on behalf of everyone in this community, that we are eager to see openSUSE’s official statement about their plans.
Since I use Intel as primary gpu I have the kernel boot options fbdev=1 nosimplefb=1 if Nvidia is primary I change that to fbdev=1 nvidia.drm_modeset=1
I have the following module options set;
/etc/modprobe.d/50-nvidia.conf
blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
##Enable NVIDIA Open Kernel Driver
##options nvidia NVreg_OpenRmEnableUnsupportedGpus=1
##Enable NVIDIA GSP Firmware
##options nvidia NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=1
##Power Management
options nvidia NVreg_DynamicPowerManagement=0x02
options nvidia NVreg_PreserveVideoMemoryAllocations=1
## Enable the PAT feature
options nvidia NVreg_UsePageAttributeTable=1
The 560 driver negates the need to set the T400 as unsupported and installs the gsp firmware, hence those options are commented out now.
I don’t use dkms, that is an option that could be used to rebuild the driver on a kernel update. I prefer to just boot to multi-user.target after a kernel update, reinstall the run file and reboot to graphical.target.
Who exactly, do you want an “Official Statement” from?
There isn’t any body within the project, that I’m aware of, that can make an “Official Statement” other than the maintainers of the NVidia driver packages.
When I say “Official Statement” I just mean someone from the official Team who is in the know and can actually say something.
There is a lot of noise in the community regarding the new Nvidia drivers and explicit sync. Not even just in the Opensuse community but in the linux communities in general.
I think it is normal people ask questions with all that is going on.
I would expect there to be some sort of community manager who can liaise between the internal team and the larger community on these kind of issues.
Someone who can explain the how and why to the community on behalf of the developers and state what is needed to change things if this is wanted.
I would not expect the mailing list to be ideal for these kind of things. At least not initially. As that can lead to unwanted spam.
As for the sentiment to just build, submit and maintain… first of all that requires to be some sort of developer or at least a package maintainer with the required technical know how.
Secondly, in this particular case I assume there is a rational on why the new feature branch is not packaged already. Seems that a discussion on this makes sense before someone does the effort to package and submit it, with the chance of it being rejected.
To summarize a bit.
If a valid question pops up multiple times over an extended period of time, I would expect some kind of statement from the internal team to be made on this question. But the Opensuse teams stays extremely silent on the topic it seems, at least to the outside world. Yet it is a topic that has made plenty of wind within the Linux community at large.
But maybe the issue is is that there is no designated community manager for this kind of interaction with the community (Honestly asking)?
I tried the run file and found that plasma acts weird (the wayland session) if Modesetting is not set.
The manual “the hard way” Only mentions it as something that is needed for prime to work. However it seems this is needed for plasma Wayland (and maybe more) as well.
Would it be an idea to update the manual to add this always to avoid issues?
Can I edit it / suggest an edit (Seems I need a separate account for that page)?
@The_Istar The only official person for a package in openSUSE is the Maintainer, there is a Tumbleweed Release Manager, but that is more of a openQA is good/bad release the snapshot.
The only group that can make a decision as to whether a package will go into the openSUSE product is the (at present) SUSE Legal team for licensing issues which may result in a packaging going into non-oss repo, or not at all, eg Patents no SPDX license etc, which if satisfied will enable it going forward. The Security team may be involved, but they will generally guide a Maintainer on what is needed.
The Mailing list would be the place to ask as this is where most Maintainers follow.
@The_Istar I don’t use Plasma, nomodesetting will disable any drivers (nvidia,amdgpu,i915 etc)
I wouldn’t use prime on newer gpu’s as it will bork what can work, whether the cards are a VGA Controller or 3-D or Display Controller. So many manufacturers setup their systems differently so what works for say Acer, may not work for example Lenovo etc…
I suggest you start a thread on your issue to work through and see what is what so to speak.
Thanks for all the replies. Since my question wasn’t answered, not even with an ETA, and the mailing list was mentioned multiple times, I’m going to write one shortly.
I’d like to try configuring that OBS repo that was mentioned in the thread (kinda got a reply on how to do it on that reddit thread, however the person who replied was very condescending and I think gave me steps that were purposefully obtuse so I fail).
