The developers of the Arch Linux distribution have announced a significant change in their approach to NVIDIA drivers. They will be replacing the proprietary packages “nvidia,” “nvidia-dkms,” and “nvidia-lts” with open-source alternatives called “nvidia-open,” “nvidia-open-dkms,” and “nvidia-lts-open.” These new packages utilize NVIDIA kernel modules.
The decision to make this swap stems from the fact that NVIDIA 590.x drivers only support GPUs from the Turing microarchitecture (RTX 20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer, rendering the proprietary modules unnecessary for older GPUs that the official repositories previously aimed to support.
The open kernel modules rely on GPUs with a GSP (GPU System Processor) microcontroller, which handles GPU initialization and control tasks through proprietary firmware. Graphical cards utilizing microarchitectures like Turing, Ampere, Ada, and Hopper are compatible with this approach.
However, GPUs from older microarchitectures such as Pascal and Maxwell, as well as other legacy devices, are incompatible with the open modules. Users with these older GPUs are advised to remove the “nvidia,” “nvidia-lts,” or “nvidia-dkms” packages and switch to the nvidia-580xx-dkms package available in the AUR repositories. On the other hand, users with Turing and newer GPUs will be seamlessly upgraded to the open kernel packages by simply installing updates using “pacman -Syu.”