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NVIDIA released today the NVIDIA 495.44 proprietary graphics driver for GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris systems with various new features and improvements.
NVIDIA 495.44 is a new feature branch version and introduces support for the GBM API, which implements a GBM backend driver that can be used with the GBM loader from the Mesa 21.2 or later. This is good news, especially for KDE Plasma users as the latest 5.23.2 update also adds initial GBM support.
In addition to GBM support, the NVIDIA 495.44 graphics driver adds an indicator for Resizable BAR support on compatible systems, adds support for several new Vulkan extensions, including the VK_KHR_present_id extension, VK_KHR_present_wait extension, and VK_KHR_shader_subgroup_uniform_control_flow extension, and it also adds support for the EGL_NV_robustness_video_memory_purge extension.
Another interesting change is the fact that, starting with this release, NVIDIA changed the minimum required Linux kernel version from Linux 2.6.32 to Linux 3.10. If your GNU/Linux system doesn’t run Linux kernel 3.10 or later, the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver cannot be installed.
Among other improvements, NVIDIA 495.44 updates the nvidia.ko kernel module to load even if there are no supported NVIDIA GPUs present when an NVIDIA NVSwitch device is detected in the system, and introduces a new command line option --no-peermem to the nvidia-installer to allow users to prevent the installation of the nvidia-peermem kernel module.
Of course, several bugs were fixed. These include a bug that may cause X11 to crash when starting a new server generation on NVIDIA PRIME configurations, two bugs in the Vulkan driver, one that could cause corruption of the interpolation qualifiers for the shader and the other one causing individual components of barycentric inputs unreadable, a bug causing kernel crashes in SLI Mosaic configurations, as well as a regression causing flickering on DisplayPort and HDMI 2.1 variable refresh rate (VRR) G-SYNC compatible monitors.
Last but not least, this release removes support for the NvIFROpenGL functionality and the libnvidia-cbl.so library from the driver package. For more details, check out the full release notes.
You can download the NVIDIA 495.44 graphics driver for 64-bit and AArch64 GNU/Linux systems, as well as for 64-bit FreeBSD systems and 32-bit and 64-bit Solaris systems right now from the official website. However, since this is NOT a production-ready branch, I suggest you stick to the NVIDIA 470.82.00 driver for stability.
Image credits: NVIDIA
Last updated 3 years ago
