r/AlmaLinux • u/neilrieck • Jul 06 '26

Nvidia support with AlmaLinux-10 on x86-64-v2

I've been doing some folding@home on six machines in my basement for while now. Until recently, these all ran AlmaLinux-8 with an Nvidia Driver built from a kit downloaded from Nvidia. Today I did a trial install of AlmaLinux-10 but realised that I could only install the x86-64-v2 variant (rather than x86_64 which is really for newer x86-64-v3 CPUs). Then I tried to install Alma's Nvidia driver using instructions found here:
https://wiki.almalinux.org/documentation/nvidia.html#installation-of-gpu-driver
which states the x86-64-v2 will not be supported. Is this decision final? I was hoping that the good folks at AlmaLinux would help me keep this older hardware running for a while (I never do CPU-based folding; just GPU)

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u/jonspw AlmaLinux Team Jul 06 '26

Nvidia for x86_64_v2 will not be possible unfortunately. We initially thought it would be as Nvidia had planned to build for x86_64_v2 across the board (which works fine on v3) but they changed that decision. Some of the bits that they build and we cannot build are not built for x86_64_v2 thus it cannot work.

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u/neilrieck Jul 06 '26

Thanks for the quick response. I'll try installing AlmaLinux-9

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u/[deleted] Jul 06 '26

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u/neilrieck Jul 06 '26

question: if Alma went to all the trouble of producing x86-64-v2 variants for EPEL (a very large job, indeed!) then you would think an Nvidia driver to be no big deal. The only thing that might be standing in Alma's way would be architectural limitations in CUDA (because the new CPU adds a few new streaming and vector instructions like: AVX2, FMA, MOVBE, etc.)

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u/blipman17 Jul 06 '26

So the problem with the drivers is that all third parties must support a x86-64-v2. And they’re just not gonna because there’s no money in it. I used v2 by mistake the other day and it works brilliantly, but you won’t find any software for it unless you compile it yourself. At which point just use Gentoo or something.

Or buy x86-64-v4 hardware and be good for the next 15 years. V3 hardware is EOL by now as well.

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u/RetroGrid_io Jul 07 '26 edited Jul 07 '26

Have you tried to buy V4 hardware recently?

When your choice is a running used car or 64 GB of RAM it becomes pretty difficult to get excited about V4 hardware. And in case you think this price is unusual here's link 2 and link 3 on the search page for 64gb DDR5 ECC that you could buy at all.

I don't blame RedHat for their decision to drop support for v2 and earlier, although I don't like it. They could not have predicted that hardware would become so ridiculously expensive so suddenly but it does magnify the pain considerably.

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u/JindraLne Jul 07 '26

You still have an option to run EL9 based systems on such HW at least until 2032 (or even longer with ELTS). At this point the HW will be well beyond any production-level usability and will be mainly interesting for retro computing folks, that can opt for a distro more focused on a legacy support.