NixOS Support Lands on NVIDIA DGX Spark
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- nixos-dgx-spark (by graham33) provides Nix support for NVIDIA DGX Spark, offering USB images and a NixOS module for full NixOS installation or devshell playbooks on stock DGX OS (Ubuntu)
- The project supports both NVIDIA DGX Spark and the Asus Ascent GX10, optionally installable remotely via nixos-anywhere for headless setups
- The NixOS module offers configurable kernel selection: NVIDIA's custom kernel (default, optimized for DGX Spark with working Ethernet) or the standard NixOS 6.17 kernel, which has known Ethernet issues
- Only DGX OS can boot from factory firmware, so users must update firmware before installing NixOS; the module enables fwupd for ongoing Linux Vendor Firmware Service updates
- The NVIDIA kernel configuration is generated from NVIDIA's Debian annotations and diffed against NixOS defaults, producing a config roughly 82% less verbose than the full baseline
- The module auto-enables the DGX Dashboard web interface at http://localhost:11000 for GPU telemetry and system monitoring
- Flox distributes pre-built CUDA packages for aarch64-linux with NVIDIA's permission—including cudatoolkit, nccl, cuDNN, and PyTorch—and is added as a substituter when the module is enabled
Why it matters: DGX Spark owners gain a reproducible, declarative way to manage their AI workstation OS instead of manually configuring DGX OS, with the NVIDIA-optimized kernel and pre-built CUDA packages via Flox dramatically cutting build times. The repo's structured diff of NVIDIA's Debian kernel annotations against NixOS defaults means custom NVIDIA hardware support can be maintained as a minimal, reviewable config rather than a bespoke patch.
