Arch Linux

inglor

Package Maintainer (PM)

Registered: 2008-07-22

Posts: 88

Nvidia oss and proprietary drivers coexist

Hi all,

I have an NVIDIA card (GTX 670). I'm currently using nouveau drivers for Xorg which works fine. Now for some development and some hardware acceleration on video encryption I understand I can use the NVIDIA card CUDA capabilities. As expected all the resources in the net suggest this as you are using already the proprietary official driver for NVIDIA. My question is though to use the Nvidia driver just when performing complicated tasks or development. All the other times (along with Xorg instance) to use the nouveau OSS driver.

First and foremost:
1. Is it possible?
2. I'm using linux-ck custom compiled kernel so I suppose this complicates things a bit more
3. I found the hints switching easy from nouveau and nvidia drivers in Wiki but this removes the other driver.
4. What about libgl package? Once one of the drivers is installed it conflicts with the other. Isn't that used by applications such as ffmpeg to offload work to the GPU?

Sorry for the too many (and maybe naive) questions but I think it's a fair question to ask.

Secondly since my CPU contains an iGPU maybe it would be better to use the intel driver for Xorg and everything for display and keep the NVIDIA for hardware acceleration? Is that possible?

Thanks
Leonidas

Lone_Wolf

Member

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,919

Re: Nvidia oss and proprietary drivers coexist

for cuda you only need to install opencl-nvidia

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)