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Comment by mepian | Hacker News Reader

The current stable proprietary driver is a nightmare on Wayland with my 3070, constant flickering and stuttering everywhere. Apparently the upcoming version 555 is much better, I'm sticking with X11 until it comes out. I never tried the open-source one yet, not sure if it supports my GPU at all.

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The 555 version is the current version. It was officially released on June 27.

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NVIDIA-555.58-Linux-Driver

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.

Yep, I'm on openSUSE Tumbleweed, and it's not rolled out there yet. I would rather wait than update my drivers out-of-band.

The versions that nixos provides are based on the files in this repo

https://github.com/aaronp24/nvidia-versions

See: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/9355fa86e6f27422963132...

You could also opt to use the latest driver instead of stable: https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nvidia

> nixos-unstable doesn't have 555

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.)

[1] https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/commit/4e15c4a8ad30c02d6c26...

`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.

Are you using flakes? If you don't do `nix flake update` there won't be all that much to update.

I am! I forgot about this. Mental model check happening.

(Still on 550.)

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

  hardware.nvidia.package = config.boot.kernelPackages.nvidiaPackages.latest;

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.

[1] https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

[2] https://nixos.wiki/wiki/Nvidia

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.

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.

I switched to Wayland 10 years ago when it became an option ok Fedora. First thing I had to do was to drop NVIDIA and switch to Intel GPU, and past 5 years to AMD GPU. Makes a big difference if the upstream kernel is supported.

Maybe NVIDIA drivers have kind of worked on 12 month old kernels that Ubuntu on average uses.

this is resolved in 555 (currently running 555.58.02). my asus zephyrus g15 w/ 3060 is looking real good on Fedora 40. there's still optimizations needed around clocking, power, and thermals. but the graphics presentation layer has no issues on wayland. that's with hybrid/optimus/prime switching, which has NEVER worked seamlessly for me on any laptop on linux going back to 2010. gnome window animations remain snappy and not glitchy while running a game. i'm getting 60fps+ running baldurs gate 3 @ 1440p on the low preset.

Had similar experience with my Legion 5i 3070 with Wayland and Nvidia 555, but my HDMI out is all screwed up now of course. Working on 550. One step forward and one step back.

is there a mux switch?

I have a 3070 on X and it has been great.

Same setup here. Multiple displays don't work well for me. One of the displays doesn't often get detected after resuming screen saver.

I have two monitors connected to the 3070 and it works well. The only issue I had was suspending, the GPU would "fall of the bus" and not get its power back when the PC woke up. I had to add the kernel line "pcie_aspm=off" to prevent the GPU from falling asleep.

So... not perfect, but it works.

Huh. I’m using 2 monitors connected to a 4090 on Linux mint - which is still using X11. It works flawlessly, including DPI scaling. Wake from sleep is fine too.

I haven’t tried wayland yet. Sounds like it might be time soon given other comments in this thread.

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