It looks like Nvidia has 3 types of driver branches
New Feature Branch (NFB),
Production (PB),
Long Term Support Branch (LTSB)
| architecture | gpu_examples | 610 NFB | 595 Prod | 590 Prod |
580 LTSB | 575 NFB | 570 Prod | 565 Prod | 560 Prod | 555 NFB | 550 Prod |
|-----------------|----------------------|---------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|----------|
| EOL date | | TBD | Mar 2027 | Dec 2026 |
Aug 2028 | Jun 2026 | Jan 2026 | Oct 2025 | Aug 2025 | Jun 2025 | Apr 2025 |
| Blackwell Ultra | B300 | ✓ | ✓ | |
| | | | | | |
| Blackwell | RTX 5090, B200 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | | | | |
| Hopper | H100 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ada Lovelace | RTX 4090, L40S | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Ampere | RTX 3090, A100 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Turing | RTX 2080, Tesla T4 | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Volta | Titan V, Tesla V100 | | | |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Pascal | GTX 1080, Tesla P100 | | | |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| Maxwell | GTX 980, Tesla M40 | | | |
✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
So we probably need the 580 LTSB in Forky.
Blackwell users will need nvidia-open-kernel-dkms (kernel module) and
nvidia-graphics-drivers (userspace).
See:
https://developer.nvidia.com/blog/nvidia-transitions-fully-towards-open-source-gpu-kernel-modules/
"For cutting-edge platforms such as NVIDIA Grace Hopper or NVIDIA
Blackwell, you must use the open-source GPU kernel modules. The proprietary
drivers are unsupported on these platforms."
