I’m about to install EOS on a pc with GTX 770 (Kepler). This adapter is no longer supported by newest nvidia drivers (495) and I had troubles when my current manjaro updated existing 470 drivers (which still support Kepler) to 495, and forced me to manually download and install 470 drivres from nvidia’s site.
My question: Does EOS installation & update process knows not to update nvidia drivers if the hardware is not supported by new drivers? If not then I will have to go with manual installation and update.
NVIDIA users have a new sanity check for NVIDIA and kernel updates. The check helps preventing boot problems after update. Apps UpdateInTerminal, eos-update-notifier and welcome include this update check.
The new sanity check only makes sure that if a kernel is updated, the corresponding nvidia driver must update too.
So it does not check the which driver version supports your nvidia card.
To check what is the supported nvidia driver, use command
nvidia-driver-supported-branches -a
This shows which of the nvidia driver series works for your card. Then you’ll need to install the corresponding driver packages manually.
Note that you’ll need to replace all conflicting nvidia related packages (that have different version in the package name).
I use the 470xx drivers myself. Because they are a different package EOS (Arch) will not automatically remove them and install the regular nvidia driver. It will only update the 470xx drivers if there are updates for them.
Yes, the package name for the 470xx drivers is named
nvidia-470xx-dkms
and the 495xx diriver is named
nvidia-495xx-dkms
In general, when pacman or yay does an update, it compares the local package database with the package database in the repo looking for installed packages with a newer package version available.
Pacman then looks in the mirrors for the newer version package and downloads and installs it.
In your case, this process will look for a newer version of nvidia470xx and installs it if necessary. nvida495xx will not be installed because nvidia470 and nvidia495 are mutually exclusion. Meaning if the PKGBUILD is formatted correctly, pacman will never install both at the same time. In a nut shell, if pacman updates nvidia470 it will NOT start substituting nvidia495 because they have different packaged names. nvidia470 and nvidia495 are two totally different packages and pacman will not substitute one for the other.
Updates are done by package name and version only.
The only difference for nvidia dkms is as @manuel said, “The new sanity check only makes sure that if a KERNEL is updated, the CORRESPONDING nvidia driver must update too.”
