Bug#663401: Nvidia developer driver

[Andreas Beckmann]

On 2012-03-10 23:27, Douglas A. Augusto wrote:
> I'm using Nvidia graphics cards exclusively for GP-GPU computation through
> OpenCL. It's known that the appropriate drivers for this type of workload are
> the ones named "developer drivers" [1], currently at version 285.05.33 [2].
> They are optimized for GP-GPU computing and, according to my experience, they
> are more robust and stable.

Are these drivers really "different" from normal releases? Aren't these
just early releases that bring the requirements for new CUDA Toolkit
versions? These drivers never get updated ... but e.g. the 295.33-1
driver I just uploaded had some symbols added in libcuda.so.1
A diff between the upstream changelogs from 285.05.33 and 295.33 shows
nothing specific to the 285.05.33 version.

> While one could install this driver directly from the script provided by
> Nvidia, it would be much more convenient if it were packaged and available
> from Debian's repository, as with the standard Nvidia drivers. I would

The Debian packaging can be easily adjusted to allow more flavors (there
is also an instrumented driver for use with nvperfkit that gets
sporadically updated and is really different, see #395243, not in Debian
because driver is outdated most of the time), but I don't really see a
benefit adding yet another driver instance.
Also, which xorg-video-abi is supported by this driver? For wheezy we
would need xorg-video-abi-12 ...


Andreas