What is the NVIDIA Server Driver?

Question

In the Software & Updates app in Ubuntu 20.04, in the Additional Drivers tab, there is an NVIDIA Server Driver option that I don't remember seeing in previous Ubuntu releases. The package name is nvidia-driver-440-server.

What are the differences between this and nvidia-driver-440?

Solution 1

Using apt-file list on the two packages, the files are identical -- the only difference is the name of the location, /usr/share/doc/nvidia-driver-440 vs. /usr/share/doc/nvidia-driver-440-server

Using apt-cache depends, the non-server metapackage has only the below five additional dependencies:

linux-modules-nvidia-440-aws  
linux-modules-nvidia-440-azure  
linux-modules-nvidia-440-gcp  
linux-modules-nvidia-440-oem-20.04  
linux-modules-nvidia-440-oracle  

--Looks like the ...server is a subset of the driver package without some possible vendor/cloud support.

Solution 2

The nvidia-driver-440 meta package includes i386 libraries whereas the nvidia-driver-440-server meta package does not. These are required for running Steam.

Comments

[Admin]

The description from apt show is "NVIDIA Server Driver support binaries", which is not very helpful if you don't know how "NVIDIA Server Driver" is different from "NVIDIA driver".

[Eliah Kagan]

They're both metapackages, so presumably the important differences are in what packages they pull in as dependencies, not what files they directly provide.