Release of nvidia-graphics-drivers UDA/ERD 515.48.07 for Bionic, Focal, Impish, Jammy, Kinetic

[Ian May]

[Impact]
These releases provide both bug fixes and new features, and we would like to make sure all of our users have access to these improvements.

See the changelog entry below for a full list of changes and bugs.

[Test Case]
The following development and SRU process was followed:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/NVidiaUpdates

Certification test suite must pass on a range of hardware:
https://git.launchpad.net/plainbox-provider-sru/tree/units/sru.pxu

The QA team that executed the tests will be in charge of attaching the artifacts and console output of the appropriate run to the bug. Nvidia maintainers team members will not mark ‘verification-done’ until this has happened.

[Regression Potential]
In order to mitigate the regression potential, the results of the
aforementioned system level tests are attached to this bug.

[Changelog]

RELEASE HIGHLIGHTS

Published the source code to a variant of the NVIDIA Linux kernel modules dual-licensed as MIT/GPLv2. The source is available here:
https://github.com/NVIDIA/open-gpu-kernel-modules
and will be updated each driver release. Please see the "Open Linux Kernel Modules" chapter in the README for details.

Added support for the VK_EXT_external_memory_dma_buf and VK_EXT_image_drm_format_modifier Vulkan extensions. To use this functionality, the nvidia-drm kernel module must be loaded with DRM KMS mode setting enabled. See the DRM KMS section of the README for guidance on enabling mode setting.

Changed nvidia-suspend.service, nvidia-resume.service, and nvidia-hibernate.service to use WantedBy= rather than RequiredBy= dependencies for systemd-suspend.service and systemd-hibernate.service. This avoids a problem where suspend or hibernate fails if the NVIDIA driver is uninstalled without disabling these services first.
See https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/21991
If these services were manually enabled, it may be necessary to update their dependencies by running
sudo systemctl reenable nvidia-suspend.service nvidia-resume.service nvidia-hibernate.service

Interlaced modes are now disabled when active stereo is enabled.

NVIDIA X Server Settings will now display the quit confirmation dialog automatically if only there are pending changes that need to be manually saved. The corresponding configuration option to control the appearance of the quit dialog was thus also removed.

Removed the warning message about mismatches between the compiler used to build the Linux kernel and the compiler used to build the NVIDIA kernel modules from nvidia-installer. Modern compilers are less likely to cause problems when this type of mismatch occurs, and it has become common in many distributions to build the Linux kernel with a different compiler than the default system compiler.

Updated nvidia-installer to skip test-loading the kernel modules on systems where no supported NVIDIA GPUs are detected.
Updated nvidia-installer to avoid a race condition which could cause the kernel module test load to fail due to udev automatically loading kernel modules left over from an existing NVIDIA driver installation. This failure resulted in an installation error message "Kernel module load error: File exists".

Updated the RTD3 Video Memory Utilization Threshold (NVreg_DynamicPowerManagementVideoMemoryThreshold) maximum value from 200 MB to 1024 MB.

Improved performance of GLX and Vulkan applications running in gamescope.
Added a "kernelopen" feature tag to the supported-gpus.json file, to indicate which GPUs are compatible with open-gpu-kernel-modules.
Improved Vulkan swapchain creation failure reporting. Applications can use the VK_EXT_debug_utils extension to receive additional information when an error was encountered in vkCreateSwapchainKHR().

Added a new configuration option for NVIDIA NGX to allow disabling the DSO signature check. See the "NGX" chapter of the README for more information.
Fixed an issue where HDMI audio output was not working in some cases, especially with high display refresh rates (120Hz, 100Hz, etc.) using Fixed Rate Link (FRL) transmission mode.

[Francis Ginther (fginther)]

UDA Testing results: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1-FPetcXMavwA1SmqBYMzTb8ASxh2ZannNToRss74daI/edit#gid=566033014

[Ubuntu SRU Bot (ubuntu-sru-bot)]

All autopkgtests for the newly accepted nvidia-graphics-drivers-515-server (515.48.07-0ubuntu0.21.10.1) for impish have finished running.
The following regressions have been reported in tests triggered by the package:

pyopencl/2021.1.2-1build2 (armhf)

Please visit the excuses page listed below and investigate the failures, proceeding afterwards as per the StableReleaseUpdates policy regarding autopkgtest regressions [1].

https://people.canonical.com/~ubuntu-archive/proposed-migration/impish/update_excuses.html#nvidia-graphics-drivers-515-server

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/StableReleaseUpdates#Autopkgtest_Regressions

Thank you!

[Sjoer van der Ploeg (sfjuocekr-r)]

The i386 packages seem to be missing, this seems to break many games that run on wine.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

The i386 packages should be publishing shortly.

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

All the packages were tested and are ready to be promoted.

[Andy Whitcroft (apw)]

The verification of the Stable Release Update for nvidia-graphics-drivers-515-server has completed successfully and the package is now being released to -updates. Subsequently, the Ubuntu Stable Release Updates Team is being unsubscribed and will not receive messages about this bug report. In the event that you encounter a regression using the package from -updates please report a new bug using ubuntu-bug and tag the bug report regression-update so we can easily find any regressions.