In defense of the parent, upcoming can still be a relative term, albeit a bit misleading. For example: I'm running the 550 drivers still because my upstream nixos-unstable doesn't have 555 for me yet.
I love NixOS, and the nvidia-x11 package is truly wonderful and captures so many options. But having such a complex package makes updating and regression testing take time. For ML stuff I ended up using it as the basis for an overlay, and ripping out literally everything I don’t need, which makes it a matter of minutes usually to make the changes requires to upgrade when a new driver is released I’m running completely headless because these are H100 nodes, and I just need persistenced and fabricmanager, and GDRMA (which wasn’t working at all, causing me to go down this rabbit hole of stripping everything away until I could figure out why).
I was going to say specialisations might be useful for you to keep a previous driver version around for testing but you might be past that point!
Having the ability to keep alternate configurations for $previous_kernel and $nvidia_stable have been super helpful in diagnosing instead of rolling back.
Version 555.58.02 is under “latest” in nixos-unstable as of about three weeks ago[1]. (Somebody should check with qyliss if she knows the PR tracker is dead... But the last nixos-unstable bump was two days ago, so it’s there.)
`nvidia-smi` shows that my driver version is 550.78. I ran `nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade` yesterday. My nixos channel is `nixos-unstable`.
Do you know something I don't? I'd love to be on the latest version.
I should have written my post better, it implies that 555 does not exist in nixpkgs, which I never meant. There's certainly a phrasing that captures what I'm seeing more accurately.
I did not mean to chastise you or anything, just to suggest you could be able to have a newer driver if you had missed the possibility.
The thing is, AFAIU, NVIDIA has several release channels for their Linux driver[1] and 555 is not (yet?) the "production" one, which is what NixOS defaults to (550 is). If you want a different degree of freshness for your NVIDIA driver, you need to say so explicitly[2]. The necessary incantation should be
This is somewhat similar to how you get a newer kernel by setting boot.kernelPackages to linuxPackages_latest, for example, if case you've ever done that.
I had this configuration but was lacking a flake update to move my nixpkgs forward despite the channel, which I can understand much better looking back.
Thanks for the additional info, this HM thread has helped me quite a bit.
