Bug#663401: Nvidia developer driver

[Douglas A. Augusto]

Hi Andreas,

Thanks for your reply.

On Fri, Mar 23, 2012 at 11:37 AM, Andreas Beckmann <debian at abeckmann.de> wrote:

> 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

I can't tell for sure, because Nvidia doesn't precisely clarify the
differences, but the drivers have been maintained separately, both being
updated from time to time. I don't think Nvidia would maintain two versions if
there were no differences between them.

>From the practical point of view, however, I can tell that there are
differences: the developer driver is more stable and seems to be optimized
towards GP-GPU computation. In general, people who do GP-GPU computation on
Nvidia devices tend to use the developer driver.

Finally, a quote from Massimiliano Fatica--an Nvidia employee--about the
developer driver:

   "[...] They are the drivers where full QA on CUDA is done."
   http://forums.nvidia.com/index.php?showtopic=225126&view=findpost&p=1383459


> A diff between the upstream changelogs from 285.05.33 and 295.33 shows
> nothing specific to the 285.05.33 version.

Unfortunately it seems that Nvidia has not been updating the developer driver's
changelog since the version 285.05.09 came out.

> Also, which xorg-video-abi is supported by this driver? For wheezy we
> would need xorg-video-abi-12 ...

I don't know. It supports at least xorg-video-abi-11; this is all I can say.


Best regards,

-- 
Douglas A. Augusto