NVIDIA unveiled A few days ago, the liberation of the new version of your NVIDIA 555.58 drivers And among the most important changes that this release presents, the support improvements for Wayland stand out, the update of minimum requirements for Linux, improvements in the installer, improvements implemented for Vulkan, among other things.
It is worth mentioning that the 550.x branch is positioned as the seventh stable branch since NVIDIA I release the components that operate at the kernel level. The new branch's kernel modules, along with their common components, are hosted on GitHub and are not tied to any operating system.
What's new in NVIDIA 555.58 drivers
In this new version of NVIDIA 555.58 that is presented, one of the improvements that stands out is in the installer, which now offers an option to choose between open and proprietary Linux kernel modules on systems where both types of kernel modules are supported. Notably, it is mentioned that in NVIDIA driver version 560, open modules are expected to be enabled by default.
Another change that stands out in the new version is that it has been added in Vulkan Wayland WSI support for immediate presentation mode, ensuring that the generated content is rendered without waiting for the completion of the vertical blanking pulse, thus avoiding interruptions in the image.
Besides that, Added support for the Wayland protocol linux-drm-syncobj-v1, that allows explicit synchronization of buffers using DRM sync objects. This protocol reduces latency, eliminates artifacts, and prevents stuttering on systems with NVIDIA GPUs and Wayland support enabled.
Also, it is highlighted that Code that uses calls from firmware to GSP has been enabled by default on systems with Turing-based GPUs (GeForce GTX 16xx and all RTXs) and newer microarchitectures including a GSP microcontroller. To disable it, the option is offered to use the parameter «NVreg_EnableGpuFirmware=0» in the kernel module.
Of the other changes that stand out:
- The minimum supported Linux kernel version has been raised from 3.10 to 4.15.
- HDMI support with 10 bits per color channel is enabled by default (can be disabled with the “hdmi_deepcolor=0” parameter).
- Added an interactive prompt to nvidia-installer to allow selecting between proprietary and open kernel modules, on systems where both types of kernel modules are supported.
- Fixed a bug that incorrectly allowed `nvidia-smi -r` to reset the main GPU when using open kernel modules.
- Removed support for Base Mosaic on GeForce, which was previously only available on select GPU boards with some motherboards and was limited to five display devices.
- Fixed a bug that caused vkGetPhysicalDeviceSurfaceSupportKHR to incorrectly report support for Wayland surfaces when nvidia-drm was not loaded with modeset=1.
- Fixed a bug that could cause the screen to hang when suspended on a kernel with CONFIG_FRAMEBUFFER_CONSOLE_DEFERRED_TAKEOVER enabled with nvidia-drm loaded with modeset=1 and fbdev=1.
- Added support for using EGL instead of GLX as an OpenGL ICD for NvFBC.
Finally if you want to know more about it About releasing this new version of the drivers, you can check the following link.
How to install NVIDIA drivers on Ubuntu and derivatives?
If you are interested in being able to use NVIDIA drivers on your system, you should know whate for Ubuntu and its derivatives, there are two ways to do it. As a preliminary step, you must identify which model of graphics card you have and which drivers are appropriate. To do this you must open a terminal and type in it:
lspci | grep -i nvidia
Done this, the first option and the one recommended for beginners or if you do not want to spoil your graphic session, it is by using the NVIDIA repository and before moving on to executing commands, it is worth clarifying that at the time of writing the article the NVIDIA 555.58 drivers are not yet available in the repository, but It's a matter of days until they are there.
To install by this method, You must first make sure your system is updated before installing drivers:
sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y
After Let's install some additional packages:
sudo apt install build-essential dkms
Now let's add repository with the following command:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt update
Now you can install the drivers, To do this, you are going to replace the "XX" with the driver that is appropriate for your graphics card in the "nvidia-driver-XX" command. In the case of this article nvidia-graphics-drivers-555).
sudo apt install nvidia-graphics-drivers-555
After installation, reboot your system for the changes to take effect:
sudo reboot
Now the second method is by downloading the driver directly from the NVIDIA website from the following link where we will download it.
Note: before carrying out any process it is important that you check the compatibility of this new driver with the configuration of your equipment (system, kernel, linux-headers, Xorg version).
Since if not, you can end up with a black screen and at no time we are responsible for it since it is your decision to do it or not.
Done the download, now let's proceed to create a blacklist to avoid conflict with the nouveau free drivers:
sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf
And in it we are going to add the following.
blacklist nouveau blacklist lbm-nouveau options nouveau modeset=0 alias nouveau off alias lbm-nouveau off
Once this is done, now we are going to restart our system so that the blacklist comes into effect.
Once the system has restarted, now we are going to stop the graphical server (graphical interface) with:
sudo init 3
In case you have a black screen at startup or if you stopped the graphical server, now we are going to access a TTY by typing the following key configuration "Ctrl + Alt + F1".
If you already have a previous version, It is recommended that you carry out the uninstallation to avoid possible conflicts:
We just have to execute the following command:
sudo apt-get purge nvidia *
And now is the time to perform the installation, for this we are going to give execution permissions with:
sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux*.run
And we execute with:
sh NVIDIA-Linux-*.run
At the end of the installation you will only have to restart your computer so that all the changes load at startup.