Legitimate source for gpumodeswitch on GRID K2 (no vGPU license, personal homelab)

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Neither “Consumer Support” (GeForce/Shield) nor “Enterprise Support” (needs an active AI Enterprise/DGX contract) really fits a secondhand GRID K2 without a vGPU license. The realistic public channel is NVIDIA Developer Forums(forums.developer.nvidia.com) — no Enterprise account needed, and it’s the same forum type where the Nutanix/gpumodeswitch discussion we found earlier lives. NVIDIA staff and community members do watch it.

I can’t post on your behalf (publishing content needs your explicit go-ahead each time), so here’s a draft you can post yourself:

Title: Legitimate source for gpumodeswitch on GRID K2 (no vGPU license, personal homelab)

Body:

I’m running four NVIDIA GRID K2 cards (GK104, Kepler) in a Dell PowerEdge R730/XC730, hand-patched the 367.57 Linux driver to build against a modern kernel (6.14), and built a working CUDA 8.0 + gcc-5 toolchain from source. cudaGetDeviceCount/cudaSetDevice/cudaGetDeviceProperties all succeed on all 4 GPUs, but any actual kernel launch fails with cudaErrorDevicesUnavailable.

I’ve confirmed via raw PCI config space (lspci -vvv) that all 4 cards report a small (~176MB) BAR and a VGA-controller class code — matching NVIDIA’s own documentation for “Graphics mode” firmware. The fix is gpumodeswitch --gpumode compute, per the GPUMODESWITCH User Guide, but I haven’t been able to locate the tool itself through any channel I have access to:

  • NVIDIA’s vGPU/GRID driver downloads (ESXi and bare-metal) — driver only, no gpumodeswitch bundled
  • The GPU/Tesla Deployment Kit (checked 2012, 2013, and 2016 releases) — NVML/healthmon only
  • Dell’s and HPE’s OEM support portals — Dell’s K1/K2 VBIOS tool is nvflash-based but board-ID-locked to Dell-branded cards
  • The NVIDIA Enterprise vGPU trial — explicitly excludes Kepler, and denies registration with a personal (non-corporate) email
  • The Internet Archive’s vGPU release preservation project — 300+ cataloged releases, no standalone gpumodeswitch package

Is there a legitimate way for a non-Enterprise, personal-use owner of this hardware to obtain gpumodeswitch (or the bootable ISO it ships in)? Happy to provide more detail if useful.

A few notes before you post it:

  • Post it under the “GPU Compute” or a Kepler/legacy-hardware-adjacent category if you see one — general visibility matters more than the exact subforum
  • If you’d rather try a more formal channel first, NVIDIA’s site also has a generic “Contact” link in the footer (separate from the Consumer/Enterprise support flows) — want me to check where that routes before you post to the forum?