On the official NVIDIA forum, an employee put out an announcement warning NVIDIA GPU owners that the Linux Kernel 5.9 and later is currently unsupported. It's worth noting they posted that in the CUDA forum, so other workloads like gaming may work as normal.
In the post they mention Kernel 5.9+ is currently "incompatible" with any of their drivers, and they're suggesting to wait until "mid-November" for a fresh NVIDIA driver update which is expected to bring support for it. They're "working diligently" to get ready to support it.
So what's going on? As it's quite unusual for such an announcement to be made. Well, NVIDIA don't appear to be saying in public why it's happening. However, we sort-of know and it's a complicated one that involves GPL licensing, Linux Kernel modules and Linux Kernel developers not being happy about how a patch was sent in by Facebook to the Kernel mailing list that would only work with the NVIDIA driver.
The result of the colourful discussion around it was a patch that was merged in, which mentions that it was designed to "prevent GPL shim modules that are used to circumvent _GPL exports" and that they will now be properly rejected.
The good news is NVIDIA are on it, and soon they will get a new fully-supported driver out. Until then, if you're on an Arch-based distribution, I can suggest trying out the NVIDIA installer from Tk-Glitch over here which seems to work quite well.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: PatolaQuoting: jrtI'm on Arch with Linux 5.9.1, Nvidia X Server Settings shows 455.28, and games work fine.Do that:
$ dmesg | grep uvm
$ lsmod | grep uvm
Also, try running Blender, go to Edit → Preferences → System, and see if you have your GPU detected at the "CUDA" tab. If you don't, you don't have the CUDA driver working.
...however, it seems that there are some 5.9 kernel builds for Arch with some workaround for the driver to work.
I'm not talking about CUDA and the article does not explicitly say that this is a CUDA driver issue.
TheRiddick Oct 19, 2020
I've read the full Kernel patch thread and I can just say good for them to get rid of this propietary crap!
Quoting: 1xokIt will go on somehow I hope. Nevertheless, I will probably slowly switch to AMD. But we (family and friends) still use NVIDIA cards in many systems. NVIDIA cards age quite well as I have noticed. My now already somewhat aged GTX 970 still runs great, especially with Proton. I recently enjoyed the first part of Sega's Yakuza series. On ultra settings the GTX 970 does not even reach 50% utilization.960 here, and it's much the same. I could use some more memory and faster storage (I'm still on spinning rust all round), but I don't feel any great pressure to upgrade my GPU.
When I do, it's likely to be AMD, though.
Luke_Nukem Oct 19, 2020
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