We have used previous Titan cards in lab workstations with Fedora Linux to get reasonably current versions of many different numerical libraries and apps. A fr

We have used previous Titan cards in lab workstations with Fedora Linux to get reasonably current versions of many different numerical libraries and apps. A frustrating aspect of the NVIDIA drivers is the poorly thought out update protocol. For our academic lab environment, admins want to run nightly package updates as a general practice to get most network-facing security updates as soon as possible. However, this doesn't mean we expect to logout or reboot every machine every night. Lab users keep odd hours and run jobs at unpredictable crunch times. In practice, nightly automated updates just work, since most lab apps lack dynamic library loader shenanigans which would get confused by new libraries on disk being swapped into place while an older process is still running older libraries in their memory space. The update experience is that one day everything works, and then next all commands fail to get an OpenGL context because the NVIDIA-related package update replaced the user-space libraries with ones that are apparently not ABI compatible with the still running kernel module. It seems absurd to me that the kernel interface and user-space library are not designed to allow seamless updates. The new user-space driver should be willing to talk to the previous kernel shim as well as the new one which may have more features. It should not expect a flag-day update for every little periodic update. The users have had to learn to reboot the workstation and hope that it will resolve the problem. Once in a while, the kernel shim apparently fails to recompile on the latest kernel update, and the reboot does not help. The admins then have to intervene to find some temporary solution such as downgrading the libraries or finding a previous kernel version where the latest kernel module successfully recompiles.