NVIDIA 495 Linux Beta Driver Released With GBM Support

NVIDIA 495.29.05 is out today as the first public Linux driver in the 495 series.

Most exciting with the NVIDIA 495.29.05 beta release is GBM API support! After years of waiting and NVIDIA wanting to pursue an alternative API instead after years of pushing EGLStreams, NVIDIA's proprietary driver has finally adopted the Generic Buffer Manager (GBM) API. This greatly enhances the Wayland support for NVIDIA's proprietary driver stack and makes it compatible with a lot more Wayland software. For example, the likes of Sway should now run fine with this new driver.

NVIDIA supporting GBM isn't entirely a surprise as we've been covering their indications of working on it now for a number of months. It's great to see this materialize. This NVIDIA GBM support works with the GBM loader support found in Mesa 21.2 and newer.

This NVIDIA 495 beta for Linux also adds an indicator for Resizable BAR (ReBAR) support, fixes a possible X.Org Server crash, and now requires at least Linux 3.10 -- Linux 2.6.32 era support through 3.9 finally removed.

Downloads and more details on this exciting NVIDIA 495 Linux beta driver via NVIDIA.com.