[mythtvnz] 18.04.1 upgrade and old Nvidia drivers

[Stephen Worthington]

On Wed, 15 Aug 2018 18:12:27 +1200, you wrote:


>Well, as Shelley wrote in "Ozymandias", nothing lasts forever,
>including workable drivers for old hardware. However, and in reply
>also to Steven W, in my decade long experience with Arch, older
>hardware remains well supported through official repositories and then
>the community through AUR. For official repositories, the drivers are
>tested and compiled and updated alongside the kernel and other core
>software more regularly than milestone distros, which *is* an
>advantage of rolling release.
>
>I am confident that even if NVIDIA EoL's the 340xx or 390xx series of
>drivers, then compatibility with the updated kernel would continue.
>And how many improvements / enhancements through drivers are we
>realistically expecting at this point in 8yr+ old graphics cards (and
>are there any real-world security concerns with graphics drivers not
>getting patched?)

The EOL for 340 is end of 2019.  Realistically, there should be a
couple of years after that where only the supporting code that
interfaces to the kernel will need patching.  But as soon as the
kernel makes significant changes to how it does video, that will break
the ability to fix things in only the supporting code, and with Nvidia
not making their proprietary code available and not fixing it
themselves, there will be no way to keep using Nvidia's drivers.  So
after that, if you want or need a newer kernel, you will have to use
the Nouveau drivers.  Which do not do 3D graphics.  And you *will*
need a newer kernel eventually, either for a security fix, or more
likely because you have some new hardware that is not supported in
older kernels (WiFi drivers for you new laptop, for example).

It would be a good idea to ask the Arch maintainers what their policy
on this problem is.  Older hardware support is not really something
that they would be doing - it is in the kernel and its drivers, and
the kernel maintainers have a policy that they try not to create any
regressions where older things stop working, and they will normally
fix any that to occur.  But that only applies to things the kernel
supports, which does not include Nvidia GPUs.