860m in Linux

I'm about to recieve a Clevo W230SS and I've noticed something annoying: The short lived version of the NVIDIA Unix drivers still don't have the 860m added.

But they do have the 750ti added, which ought to work! They are identical in terms of how the software handles them.

There is a file somewhere in the nvidia driver that let's you add unsupported GPU's, but I've long since forgotten where it is. Does anybody happen to know? It's a basic list of the supported GPU's that the driver references.

Thanks,

Frumme

 

I would suggest holding off on the nvidia driver until official support is released in a month or two. The only 800M series chip that is listed as supported right now is the 820M, which is fermi arch instead of maxwell. You should be able to get BBswitch to turn the card off with a bit of hacking in the meantime.

 

It's my understanding that the driver actually does work just fine once you add the card to the support because hardware wise the GTX 860M and the 750 ti are identical. Both Maxwell, same number of stream cores, same vram and bandwidth.

I did a system wide search and spent a good 40 minutes searching through the results for anything related to the nvidia driver but wasn't able to locate this file. I know it's there, but it's very well hidden apparently.

 

My guess is that it can't be done. A quick search of the kernel module source shows it calling rm_is_supported_device() during initialization which is already compiled into the other shared objects of the binary driver. It might be possible to mod the shared object but that would require some disassembly and the would probably be unusuable if there are any differences between the mobile and desktop card to its registers and how it maps to dma. I don't think nvidia would be "holding back" compatibility of the card for any reason if the driver could support it.

Last year, the 750M was released early April, and the first Linux driver that supported it was early May, if I recall. So very likely the next driver release should support these cards.

 

The driver, to my knowledge, has used a single file to list out supported devices that all other parts of the driver reference since at least when the 304 driver was released. Whether or not it works, there is a file fitting that description. There's a guy running Arch in the NP7338 owner's lounge that managed to get the driver functioning (with the 860m) but he didn't provide details.