Recent default driver in sgfxi has become "352.21;340.76" which seems to be some combined mistake. Because of that it fails to download and run anything.

Running it like this works:



Also, what happened to the short lived driver option? Why was it removed?
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Thanks, that was as you saw a typo, ; instead of :

that's fixed.

I don't know what you mean about the short lived driver option.

Do you mean the long lived one? that was never an actual option beyond sgfxi usually offering those as -o install options, but I haven't been very careful about having those in sgfxi, but I can add them again to make sure that's always in as well.

Did you mean the beta driver? beta is only offered when beta is newer than current latest stable.
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Nvidia lists these drivers at present:

Latest Long Lived Branch version: 352.21
Latest Short Lived Branch version: 349.16
Source: www.nvidia.com/object/unix.html

Short lived branch is supposed to get more frequent updates, and be less stable. Long lived branch gets updates when they are more polished. I.e. if I understood correctly, short lived one is somewhere in between stable and beta.
See news.softpedia.com/news/NVIDIA-Linux-Long-Lived-Driver-Branch-Gets-Updated-with-Fixes-460819.shtml

So, from what I see, sgfxi offers long lived branch now, but not the short lived one. In this case however it appears that long lived branch is actually newer than the short lived one, which is confusing.
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No, you are confused. sgfxi doesn't offer as default the latest short OR long lived branch, it offers the latest DRIVER. period. It's a numeric version number test. If -B beta was used, and if beta is > current driver for that card version, then use beta, otherwise install or update current driver. If -o is used, then use that explicitly. There is no 'short lived', or 'long lived' in sgfxi, just driver numbers. I offer the long lived usually as well in -o for the few people who might feel there is some benefit to using those, though personally I doubt there is. I think that's mainly for ubuntu and redhat/fedora.

raw.githubusercontent.com/aaronp24/nvidia-versions/master/nvidia-versions.txt

This is the actual list, you're confusing a typo on the web page you found with reality.



that's reality. There is no 'short lived branch', which is why I never heard of it. There is beta, current stable, and long lived branch. There is nothing else. Then there are the various legacy drivers, which now and then get a beta, but almost never anymore, though they used to a long time ago. Now they just get a new version usually.

If you've been following nvidia a long time, there used to also be 'prerelease', which was kind of a pre stable, but no longer beta, but they don't use those anymore either.

Sometimes that data will show the long lived branch and 'official' are the same, other times the official is the new series, and the long lived an older series. Right now long lived branch and official current are different, for example, because the 352 just became the new stable current line. At some point in the future, nvidia will create a new long term support branch. And so on.

Now, of course, on the other hand, we have the far simpler amd model, which has been to simply not do any driver releases, they did 2 in 6 months, one 2014-12, and one 2015-06, amd is clearly significantly reducing anything even faintly resembling real linux kernel support, then they'll have their integrated driver coming, which will probably cause all kinds of issues, which will be non free code ontop of a new free stack, I guess their thinking is to drop costs even more by just adding features to the non free driver over the free one, but that's being done to cut costs, don't be fooled, everything amd is doing now is to reduce linux support costs, been the case for at least 2 years now.

sgfxi internally in the top comments more or less shows all the nvidia driver releases and what branch etc they belong to, that's for my own reference since there's no real other way to track that data over years.
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