NVidia GeForce 7300 LE only working on older LE (7.0)

1st Official Post

    I tried to install LE on a PC with an old GeForce 7300 LE. With LE 7.0 it runs fine, from 8.2 on and higher, i just get an "Xorg server failed to start" from LE. When i replace the 7300 LE with a GeForce 635 TI b o o s t (*) all versions up to latest 9.2.x seem to work fine.

    Is this expected ?

    If yes, then why ? This would be something i would expect if LE was using the NVidia proprietary driver because that one was dropping support for older cards, but given how other distro's i use (e.g.: debian) say those drivers can not be included, i was expecting for LE to use Nouveau. But i could not find documentation for what it uses.

    If not, then how would i debug this (URL would help). Couldn't figure out how to get to any form of debug, look at xorg.log (new to LE).

    (*) The message contains censored words: b o o s t.

    • Official Post

    LE embeds multiple nVidia (vendor) drivers to support different generations of GPUs, but the 304.xx series is the last one to support 7-series cards and this no longer supports the ABI version we need to support current Xorg with other GPUs (Intel, AMD, etc.) so it was dropped and the oldest driver we include now is the 340.xx series which stops at the 8-series cards. As 7-series cards are now 15+ years old we're comfortable with that - never in our history have we ever pitched ourselves as something to use with old or recycled hardware, and our focus is on current and bleeding edge HTPC kit. In the future we might drop nVidia drivers completely and default to nouveau, but nouveau hasn't been tested (by nouveau developers) on cards that old for a long time either so I wouldn't guarantee it works. Time for a GPU upgrade, or swap to a Raspberry Pi 4 which will probably be cheaper and will out-perform anything that shipped with a GeForce 7-series card.

    Thanks, chewitt.

    Some thoughts:

    I always considered solutions like LE to be ideal for older hardware, because it avoids unnecessary resource consumption. Of course, it does not make sense to invest testing cycles only into the combinations most used by the community.

    Latest debian runs fine on the card, aka: nouveau works fine.

    Independent of the graphics card: What is the APIs required by LE 10 / Kodi 19, and does Nouveau support them ? Do you think support for that API in Nouveau depends on the graphics card ?

    I am just curious, i had no plan to use this for production. Just somewhat sad that old hardware is obsoleted this way. I kept the 7300 LE as the last NVidia generation with full analog HD output signal (if i remember correctly).

    • Official Post

    Despite being a total pariah when it comes to following open-source standards the nVidia folks deserve credit for supporting cards with updated LTS drivers for huge time periods, but even they have limits. I forget what specific X11 version caused the break, but I think it was around LE 9.0 when nVidia stopped updating the 304.xx drivers and we switched to 340.xx. GitHub will have a record of the change.