An external NVIDIA package repository for Nix/NixOS

Acknowledgements

The source in this repository is derived from the upstream NVIDIA driver packaging work found in NixOS/nixpkgs. As such, this repository is also licensed under the MIT License.

Purpose

The nixpkgs packaging for the NVIDIA drivers tends to be conservative in terms of picking up the latest versions NVIDIA posts. This packaging is designed such that it can be consumed by anyone, but the main reason I am making this is for my own need to test the latest NVIDIA driver releases. The other purpose was to derive all components of the driver install from the runfile, without depending on github.com/NVIDIA repositories. From NixOS’s perspective, using the GitHub repositories is a better choice, but I personally need components such as NVIDIA Settings to come from the runfile.

Usage

The usage of this work is quite simple thanks to the fact that it’s designed to be compatible with nixos/modules/hardware/video/nvidia.nix.

In /etc/nixos/configuration.nix:

{ config, lib, pkgs, ... }:

with lib;

let
  kernelPackages = pkgs.linuxPackages; # Or preferred linux kernel package

  nvidiaPkgs = import (builtins.fetchTarball https://github.com/Binary-Eater/nixpkgs-nvidia/archive/trunk.tar.gz) {
    lib = lib;
    callPackage = pkgs.callPackage;
    stdenv = stdenv;
    pkgsi686Linux = pkgsi686Linux;
    kernel = kernelPackages.kernel;
  };
in
{
  # ...
  boot.kernelPackages = kernelPackages;

  hardware.nvidia = {
    package = nvidiaPkgs.beta; # or nvidiaPkgs.new_features if "New Feature Branch" is preferred
    nvidiaSettings = false; # NVIDIA Settings has to be disabled since this
                            # repository does not provide it and upstream
                            # nvidia.nix module does not safely handle when the
                            # package definition is null
    open = true; # Both open and closed modules are supported
    
    # Other options here... Refer to search.nixos.org
  };
  # ...
}

Design Choices

I plan to blog about why I make certain design changes in the packaging work compared to what is done in the nixpkgs repository and go over some of the flexible ways to utilize this work. Till then, the biggest thing to note is that this repository treats NVIDIA runfiles as the only provider for GPU software components. The implementation is done in a way that packages created in this repository can directly satisfy the hardware.nvidia.package Nix option, making utilizing the work trivial.