Proxmox 8.0.3 simple NVIDIA card

[W89VK]

Hi all, I have 2 Proxmox servers with a KDE desktop environment and I would like to have a simple GT620 to carry display in each since 1) the onboard Matrox G200eR2 chip is too slow for comfort 2) I want to be able to use a 2K resolution screen.

I don't need any passthrough or anything like that.

I'm familiar with how to do it on a regular Ubuntu/Debian install, where you modify the xorg.conf file after driver install etc. but approaches like that don't seem to apply since PVE runs a different kernel (as far as I can figure out).

How would I go about configuring this?

If you need any terminal output or hardware specifics please let me know.

Thanks.

 

[dcsapak]

since PVE is basically Debian underneath, the same guides/configuration as Debian/Ubuntu should apply for that.

What did not work specifically?

(note that while running a DE on top of PVE works, i can only help so far since it's not an "officially supported setup" and we try to limit support/help to PVE specific things)

 

[W89VK]

Thanks for your reply, Dominik.

I did some digging and found out that this thread more or less addressed the issue I was having. However, it seems that the GT 620 cards/driver I have are NVIDIA legacy and can't work with the newer PVE kernel (or something like that)... Frankly, I'm a bit in over my head about this and I'll put it in the freezer for now, or find a different card setup. I understand the limits of your support, so no worries if you don't follow up on this.

 

[zodiac]

By and large, NVIDIA doesn't play nicely with open source software. This has been a problem for at least two decades now. You never know whether a mandatory security upgrade to your kernel will result in you no longer having access to a working graphics card. There are open source reverse-engineered drivers for NVIDIA hardware, but they are constantly playing catch-up, as NVIDIA isn't providing support to the developers. And various NVIDIA devices have locked-down hardware that is difficult or impossible to support.

It's all rather tedious and if at all possible, I'd recommend you get hardware from a manufacturer that behaves more maturely and has a better track record of playing nice with the rest of your system.

On the other hand, if you have a service agreement with NVIDIA and limit yourself to software stacks that they officially support (i.e. not Proxmox), then their hardware is quite nice. But that is quite limiting, can get very expensive quite quickly, and you never know if future business decisions end up making your hardware investments unsupportable. So, expect to upgrade all of your hardware on an aggressive schedule.

 

[W89VK]

Solved:

1. Install newer cards, GT 620 was too old. Now running one GTX 1050 and a Quadro K4000.
2. add pve-no-subscription repository by adding deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian/pve bookworm pve-no-subscription to /etc/apt/sources.list
3. apt update
4. apt install pve-headers pve-headers-`uname -r` build-essential pkg-config libglvnd-dev -y
5. create file: /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia.conf; add "blacklist nvidiafb" and "blacklist nouveau"
6. run "update-initramfs -c -d -u"
7. reboot into recovery mode
8. run ./NVIDIA-*.run