The Story: Defying Obsolescence
Kepler GPUs (2012–2014) are e-waste by NVIDIA's timeline, but they are perfectly capable hardware for inference workloads. The GTX 770 has 1536 CUDA cores and 2 GB GDDR5 — enough for small-to-medium LLMs. This project proves that with a five-byte fix and some kernel backports, these GPUs can be kept useful on modern Linux systems, reducing e-waste and teaching real systems engineering along the way.
Goal
Keep an NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 (GK104, sm_30) — a Kepler GPU abandoned by NVIDIA's driver stack after driver 470.256.02 and CUDA 10.2 — running CUDA workloads on a modern Linux kernel (6.15 → 7.x, Ubuntu 26.04).
Two problems made stock software a dead end:
