# nvidia-driver 4xx no board identification during boot



## mickey (Nov 28, 2019)

One thing I noticed after having updated x11/nvidia-driver from 390.87 to the more recent 4xx series driver is that it doesn't show the boards identifaction during boot anymore. Other than that the driver seems to be working perfectly fine.

Driver version 390.87 used to display:

```
nvidia0: <GeForce GTX 670> on vgapci0
```
Whereas current 440.31 shows up as:

```
nvidia0: <Unknown> on vgapci0
```
Should I be worried or are others seeing this behaviour also?


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## SirDice (Nov 28, 2019)

What card do you have? I have a GT520 and needed to switch to x11/nvidia-driver-390, the newer x11/nvidia-driver didn't support it any more.


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## mickey (Nov 28, 2019)

SirDice said:


> What card do you have? I have a GT520 and needed to switch to x11/nvidia-driver-390, the newer x11/nvidia-driver didn't support it any more.


The card is an ASUS GTX670-DC2-2GD5 and according to https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/154998/en-us  the GeForce 600 series is still listed as supported by the most recent 440.36 FreeBSD x64 driver.


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## shkhln (Nov 28, 2019)

```
% dmesg | grep nvidia
nvidia-modeset: Loading NVIDIA Kernel Mode Setting Driver for UNIX platforms  440.31  Sun Oct 27 02:07:28 UTC 2019
nvidia0: <Unknown> on vgapci0
vgapci0: child nvidia0 requested pci_enable_io
vgapci0: child nvidia0 requested pci_enable_io
```

Doesn't seem to impact anything, though.


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## mickey (Nov 28, 2019)

shkhln said:


> Doesn't seem to impact anything, though.


No, I got KDE5 plasma running without a problem, I can watch videos using VDPAU and none of the few games I got on FreeBSD did complain either. Also the same machine runs Windows 10, Steam and Games with a fairly recent nvidia driver without any problem too. The <unknown> thing seems to be a problem introduced in the 4xx series of nvidia's drivers, as I remember having played around with the 410/412 driver versions some time ago (downloaded directly from nvidia, not from ports) and those too would not identify the board but other than that worked fine. At that time I decided to go with the 390.87 version from ports as the 410/412 versions did not seem to give any added benefit.


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## shkhln (Nov 28, 2019)

mickey said:


> as I remember having played around with the 410/412 driver versions some time ago



No FreeBSD upgrades since then?



mickey said:


> as the 410/412 versions did not seem to give any added benefit.



Most of the improvements are related to Vulkan and PRIME (Optimus) support.


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## mickey (Nov 28, 2019)

shkhln said:


> No FreeBSD upgrades since then?
> Most of the improvements are related to Vulkan and PRIME (Optimus) support.


Probably a few, including the recent upgrade from releng/12.0 to releng/12.1. The motivation to try drivers directly downloaded from nvidia was because of the port not seeing any updates from 390.87 in quite some time until just recently, although 4xx versions had been available. But in the end it just felt more comfortable to go with the "supported" version from the ports tree.


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