[Buildroot] Updating nvidia-driver package

[John Koch]

I’ve been maintaining a renamed local version to avoid conflicts with the
existing one. I don't know everything maintaining an official Buildroot
package involves, but I'm happy to help where I can.

My main motivation is to reduce our out-of-tree patches and hopefully help
others in the community. However, because our systems run strictly headless
for GPU-accelerated Docker containers, I haven't tested any window managers
or display servers, so I can't speak to the Xwayland/LIB_GL build issue
directly.

I have changed the driver package fairly significantly, and to align with
standard release practices it might require further changes. For example,
the standard release includes modprobe and persistenced as separate
packages, looking like the following:
Target packages ---> Hardware handling --->
nvidia-driver
    CUDA support
    nvidia kernel module
nvidia-modprobe
nvidia-persistenced

Users may need a different driver version based on their GPU hardware
architecture. I made the hardware architecture a selectable option because
it seemed like the most user-friendly method. I also added an option for
"Management utilities" (e.g. nvidia-smi, nvidia-persistenced,
nvidia-debugdump, etc.). It makes more sense to me to bundle those under
the driver rather than have them as separate packages. Perhaps they should
be individually selectable within the driver package. I also give the
option to build the kernel-open driver versus the proprietary driver where
the option is available (e.g. Turing, Ampere, Ada, Hopper). My
implementation looks like the following:
nvidia-driver
    GPU architecture
        Fermi
        Kepler
        Maxwell / Pascal / Volta
        Turing / Ampere / Ada / Hopper
        Blackwell and newer
    Open-source kernel module (kernel-open/) [Based on GPU architecture
selection]
    CUDA support
    Management utilities
    Kernel modules

In terms of kernel and toolchain support, I’ve primarily focused on recent
Buildroot LTS releases and their default kernel pairings. My testing is
limited to newer NVIDIA hardware (Ada and Blackwell), so I'll definitely
need help from others to confirm the driver works with older legacy GPUs.
That being said, I have confirmed driver compilation works for many default
configurations under 2025.02.x, 2026.05.x, and the 2026.08.x release
candidate.

If that all sounds reasonable I can prepare and send over the patch series
for review.

On Wed, Sep 2, 2026 at 1:57 PM John Ernberg <j at j-ernberg.se> wrote:

> Hi John,
>
> > For a while I have been locally modifying the nvidia-driver package to
> > allow its use with more modern hardware architectures (e.g., Turing and
> > above). Recently I also added support for the open-source driver which is
> > required for the Blackwell architecture (and beyond). I believe I
> retained
> > support for the older legacy architectures but I am unable to test those
> > due to lack of supported hardware. Would there be any interest in
> reviewing
> > and possibly merging these changes into the nvidia-driver package?
>
> If you're using it and plan to maintain it, post the patches, the package
> is currently orphaned, so adding yourself to DEVELOPERS as well could be an
> idea.
>
> I started looking at trying to compile the existing nvidia-driver package
> after Adam ran into an xwayland compile issue with the LIB_GL providers
> (which I also ran into earlier and didn't have time to figure out how to
> properly fix - due to the nvidia driver not being buildable).
>
> The last few days I have tried again to figure out how to build the current
> nvidia-driver with a supported kernel (according to nvidia docs) and have
> not
> been able to find a combination of internal toolchain and kernel version
> that
> builds.
>
> As far as I can tell all in-tree toolchains are too new, so when the kernel
> versions compile the driver doesn't, and when the kernel doesn't compile
> ...
> I don't know if the driver would compile either.
>
> Do you or any of the others CC'd use the package as it is today? And if so,
> have a defconfig that builds the current nvidia-driver package?
> It needs a myriad of patches if it's going to build for any kernel besides
> possibly the 5.10 CIP kernel (which is doesn't build for either... as far
> as I can tell).
> So maybe support for this version is not necessary to keep.
>
> Best regards // John Ernberg
>
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