I am trying to install Nvidia 340.108 legacy drivers to support Geforce 210 GPUs on AlmaLinux 8.4.
340-x is the latest drivers that support this GPU, but some very limited information online points to newer kernel versions not supporting this driver. The driver starts installation but always ends @ ~56% with “ERROR: Unable to build the NVIDIA kernel module.”
The nouveau driver is giving us some performance issues.
Any ideas or solutions for others running legacy GPUs?
First thing to check is whether ELRepo has build the older legacy versions for el8. They haven’t. One could ask them why.
I did notice (by accident) that RPM Fusion has NVidia drivers, even the 340xx. Alas, by date it is not for current (8.4) of el8. They too have stopped building. (I’ve never used Fusion’s version, so don’t know about it anyway.)
NVidia have their own yum repository, but they don’t host any legacy in it.
Ain’t build systems “wonderful”? You see some “progress bar” and then Done! No verbosity. All useful information is hidden somewhere. Well, perhaps they do have verbosity option?
Even when we see compiler&linker (or kernel boot) output the line where everything stops is not the most revealing. It is almost always the first error, many lines earlier, that points to the actual problem – the rest is just ripples.
In other words: why does the build fail?
It is possible that the old driver depends on features that the current kernel of el8 does not have. Part of the problem is that NVidia’s driver is built from binaries, not source code. Hardcoded dependency on binary interface of the kernel.