Is the Linux x64 (AMD64/EM64T) Display Driver still cut

madhits · January 19, 2018 at 6:46 PM

Hello, About a year ago libreElec decided to cut older drivers for kodi 17. I was more then just a little upset at the time. Now I am wondering if this decision has stood before the release of kodi 18?

I still have 2 machines that rely on these drivers and to my utter surprise Nvidia released another drivers update to Version: 304.137 Release Date: 2017.9.19.

I expected the update before that one to be its last but we got another update for a series of graphics cards made way way back in the daw of time itself 2005. Here are the details: NVIDIA

So my question is are the Nvidia 304.137 drivers still cut from Libreelec?

I am still building my own builds of kodi to support my graphics card, wondering if the team hear had a change of heart on this? I know the builds need to be small and I get that but graphics is like #1 and there are no driver packs for kodi (I wish there was). Having to maintain my own builds is doable but a pain cuz I'm such a noob at this.

**Klojum** · January 19, 2018 at 9:34 PM Official Post

Quote from madhits

About a year ago libreElec decided to cut older drivers for kodi 17.

I have a feeling you were misinformed back then. LibreELEC has always provided both Nvidia's legacy and new stable video drivers. I do not know by heart which exact driver versions have been currently bundled, but both are available. We may not pick every single new Nvidia driver for LibreELEC, but as you build your own LibreELEC release, choosing a different video driver is not a problem. Which graphics card do you have?

madhits · January 19, 2018 at 10:20 PM

I have 2x gerforce 7800 cards, series 7 cards. The cards use 304.137 driver. My understanding from Libreelec 8.0 was the the driver 304.137 was not included or that the cards earlier then series 7 were not included. I cant recall how it was diced up. I think it had to do with hardware decoding which I was ok losing. According to the kodi info here: Supported hardware - Official Kodi Wiki

Nvidia GeForce 6-Series or newer is needed for software decoding and I'm fine with that but I think libreelec cut off the drivers all together with no option to put them back in. I understand series 7 cards do not have VDPAU but I think they have VA-API support.

I rarely play video higher then 720p and that along with 1080p content plays fine with software decoding.

Anyway has anything changed?

**chewitt** · January 20, 2018 at 3:40 AM Official Post

The decision to drop 304.xx was based on packaging logistics; the nVidia drivers are large and including 3x of them would have caused issues for OE users crossgrading to LE due to OE's smaller boot partition size. There are no plans to revisit that decision. However, it's a trivial one-line change to build your own LE image with the older driver (only the 'legacy' driver version number is changed) and last time I looked someone was releasing an image with that change via a thread in these forums. Go Google for it.

**milhouse** · January 20, 2018 at 2:24 PM

Nvidia officially ended support for the 304 driver series at the end of 2017, so it is now no longer developed/maintained/supported by the manufacturer:

Support timeframes for Unix legacy GPU releases | NVIDIA

Building LibreELEC with the final 304 driver and latest kernel and other related packages may be possible in future but will be become increasingly difficult as more patches and fixups are required.