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Comment by bcrescimanno | Hacker News Reader

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.

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