Debian cuda-drivers 590.44.01-1 Causes Boot Failure on GTX-1070 Ti

STOP. Before you mutter, “Dur-hey; we announced months ago GTX-1000 series boards would be deprecated in v590,” and round-file this, read to the end.

Last night I upgraded the cuda-drivers Debian package to 590.44.01-1 from https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/debian12/x86_64 . The package and and its dependencies all installed successfully.

Upon reboot, the driver reported that v590 no longer supported my GTX-1070 Ti, and the boot stopped. Luckily, I was able to change to a text console and repair the system.

The bug is that the drivers installed at all. v590 Debian packages should incorporate a preinst script that probes for unsupported hardware and, if found, aborts the installation, or at the very least throws up a dialog saying, “Hey! Old board; this driver won’t work. Do you want to proceed with the install anyway? [Yes] [[No]]”. Aborting the install would leave the working drivers undisturbed, saving the user from having to spend an hour repairing their system.

But Debian didn’t supply the drivers.

You elected to use an external repo.

I also packaged the 590 drivers for Arch just to witness the failure.

See also the sticky thread: