Problem/Justification
5-series Nvidia cards are not currently supported on Truenas Scale which is a massive missed opportunity for Truenas. Users can’t personally update drivers, and have to wait for Truenas to release a full update, which only happens a handful of times a year.
Impact
As more Truenas users play around with AI and as 5-series cards become more commonplace, Truenas risks either handicapping their users, or losing them altogether for other solutions.
User Story
I got excited about the relatively plug-and-play capabilites that Truenas had for AI LLMs, so I sprang for some hardware upgrades including a new MB, CPU, and a 5060 GPU to make my local LLMa viable piece of my workflow.
You can imagine my disappointment when, after nearly two days of tinkering and messing around, I find out that you can’t update Nvidia drivers yourself but have to wait for Truenas to release an update. The general release cadence is about twice a year.
Truenas needs to either prioritize this release, or bake in some kind of driver update functionality that won’t break the system.
I doubt many enterprises will use TN with 5-Series graphics cards. If they need GPU resources they will likley use another box. So your description as a “massive missed opportunity” is hyperbole at best. Remember that TN is aimed at he enterprise, we are just allowed to play
You want a GPU driver update - I want the drivers to stay exactly as they are as I am using (from memory) a P2000 card and am a little concernced for the time when that card is no longer supported.
I just checked which version of the NVIDIA drivers are required to support the RTX 50 series and it looks like v570 is required. According to some sources, 570.144 or newer should be used for stable support. On the NVIDIA download page, the most recent version for Linux x64 is 570.181 from August 5th, 2025 (as of August 9th, 2025).
I compared the list of supported products between the currently used 550.142 and 570.181. According to the list, support for a single GPU has been dropped in 570 (HGX-Series: H20-3e). I don’t think anybody should be affected by this, since the H- and HGX-series are using different drivers anyway.
So, there is no harm in updating the driver to v570 and I’m voting for it to support the RTX 50 series GPUs.
Sources:
[ sorry, I’m not allowed to post links, please compile the URL yourself ]
550.142: nvidia .com/en-us/drivers/details/237853/
570.181: nvidia .com/en-us/drivers/details/252411/
In order for the 50-series cards to be supported, the use of the new NVIDIA open kernel module is required. Blackwell chips won’t work with the standard/proprietary one. So, that’s live in the 25.10-MASTER builds right now, and it’ll be in the BETA dropping shortly.
But, the open kernel module requires the presence of the NVIDIA GPU System Processor (GSP) - this offloads tasks like GPU initialization, power management, and other operations from the driver into the firmware.
And the GSP was was only introduced with the Turing (GTX 16-series) and later processors.
Which means that enabling support for the 50-series means folks with a Maxwell, Pascal, or Volta card - the GTX 10-series and Quadro P-series - lose their App acceleration support.
