Resurrecting Kepler: Getting Modern LLMs Running on a GTX 770 (Kernel 7.x)

⚠️ Experimental hack: Use on non-critical systems. Ensure you have backups. This patches a proprietary binary at the instruction level — no warranty, no support.

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:

1. 
   Kernel module won't compile — the 470.256.02 driver source doesn't build against kernels ≥6.15 due to dozens of removed/renamed APIs.


2. 
   cuInit returns error 802 — even after the module loads and nvidia-smi works, every CUDA program fails with CUDA_ERROR_SYSTEM_NOT_YET_INITIALIZED.

Technical Deep-Dive

1. Kernel Module Patching

The proprietary 470.256.02 driver source does not build against kernels ≥6.15 due to removed/renamed APIs. I used community-sourced patch sets (primarily from .