I own a Lenovo ThinkPad W541 with a Quadro K2100M. These workstations are still widely used because they are reliable, repairable, and powerful enough for Linux development and engineering work.
I am not asking for new features. I am asking NVIDIA to continue maintaining the 470.xx legacy driver so it remains compatible with new Linux kernels and X11. Security fixes and build compatibility would allow many of us to continue using otherwise excellent hardware for years to come.
If we try to compile the current NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02.run
for the GT 640 with ‘export GCC=gcc-13’ and call the file (after chmod +x) there is an obvious error message /tmp/selfgz9831/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-470.256.02/kernel/nvidia/os-mlock.c:23:12: error: implicit declaration of function ‘follow_pfn’; did you mean ‘folio_pfn’? [-Werror=implicit-function-declaration]
The same error appears in NVIDIA-Linx-x86_64-555.42.02.run. (The switch to gcc-13 is to match the cc version which is used to compile the kernel unter openseSUSE 16.0)