6 ms·

Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

132 points by graham33 2mo ago

Try DGX Spark playbooks using Nix on DGX OS, or install NixOS on your DGX Spark for the full Nix experience. The repository provides USB images and a NixOS module with settings for DGX Spark systems. This works on the NVIDIA DGX Spark itself and also on the Asus Ascent GX10. See my 5 minute lightning talk from Planet Nix for an intro: https://youtu.be/AvK_gi_snJE?si=MPKv3iiuS9B5elIE https://youtu.be/AvK_gi_snJE?si=MPKv3iiuS9B5elIE

hamza7159 2mo ago
[dead]
nixie-tubes 2mo ago
This has been amazingly helpful for managing my DGX Spark! Thank you for all your time and effort into this project!
- graham33 2mo ago
  Good to hear, thanks!
redrove 2mo ago
Been running this on a few Asus GX10 machines with k3s on top, it’s been great. I’m running the new deepseek. Thank you for your work!
- pixelesque 2mo ago
  What quant are you using, and what tps are you getting with K3?
  - redrove 2mo ago
    The FP8 version from DeepSeek themselves [0], around 1800 tps prefill and 45 tokens per second decode. I’ve been running a custom VLLM image with b12x as well as nvfp4_ds_mla. I would say it’s quite fantastic in day to day, I use it mostly in Hermes and sometimes for coding. I have qwen 3.6 27b on an rtx 6000 pro as well so I use that as a workhorse in pi with DS as a reviewer/planner. [0] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 Edit: I think you may have misread my post. k3s is NOT kimi k3, and I did mention I was running deepseek.
    - pixelesque 2mo ago
      Thanks - yeah, sorry, I mis-read that as you using both DS and K3...
      - reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
        I'm doing K3 with SoL kernels, zero hassle, myelin to sweep up the crap, on shot deploy to vast or runpods. Free to the community. I have to do like, low paying web dev to fund it, so I can't promise timelines, but it's coming and it will be free to anyone and fast as fuck. I estimate about 20 bucks an hour at current spot rates in the hundreds if not thousands of tokens per second.
        reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
        @pg @dang you're asking me how a watch works. let's just try to keep an eye on the time. federal felony prosecution.
      - redrove 2mo ago
        No worries! Would love to run K3 but lack the hardware for a 2.8T model, like most people.
- reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
  i also used nixos as the base, but i went a little overboard with it, this is 7.1.2 supporting all devices and a custom driver that fixes the UMA page leak issues, and the wallpapers are all kernels at or above parity with what you can get out of the box. i'm not quite ready to OSS the whole thing, it's got a few rough edges, but if anyone wants to alpha test, caveat emptor and it's yours. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mCUZ9XHIogw https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mCUZ9XHIogw
  - ianlevesque 2mo ago
    A fix for the leaks would be great. I’m rebooting them way too often when iterating.
    - reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
      https://cdn.s4.gl/0001-Avoid-allocations-in-system-memory-page-free-path.patch https://cdn.s4.gl/0001-Avoid-allocations-in-system-memory-pa...
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
    That short got like, way more views than I thought. This is a little more of the complex plane math. https://youtu.be/WXcElxvSevM?si=HHbnzSNddIcPGCll https://youtu.be/WXcElxvSevM?si=HHbnzSNddIcPGCll
  - redrove 2mo ago
    I’d be happy to test this out if you want to publish an alpha branch or something.
- neobrain 2mo ago
  Just curious, has suspend (to RAM) been working for you? For me the nvidia driver just keeps waking up the system instantly - but my setup is deviating from the upstream flake in a few ways, so I'm just wondering if it's worth setting up the system from scratch if it's working for other people. Other than that, can fully second that the flake is working great. Only gotcha is that CUDA-enabled packages (including Firefox) require using the flox binary cache unless you want to compile them from source, but then the package versions can lag behind a bit (and debugging nix cache issues is surprisingly difficult).
thenobsta 2mo ago
This is incredible. I have a Jetson lying around and will try to it out on this. I use it to play with vision models, not LLMs, and have been wanting a better way to manage the machine.
- reasonabl_human 2mo ago
  you probably want this if you have a jetson vs this spark repo: https://github.com/anduril/jetpack-nixos https://github.com/anduril/jetpack-nixos
haunter 2mo ago
Thanks for sharing, saving this for when I get a DGX Spark
ronef 2mo ago
Huge plus to anyone interested in the space to check out what Graham built here! If anyone is also interested on Nix/CUDA/Capital Markets/Flox, we recently did another case study in the space - https://flox.dev/blog/deploying-hardened-flox-nvidia-cuda-stacks-in-minutes-not-hours/ https://flox.dev/blog/deploying-hardened-flox-nvidia-cuda-st...
hamandcheese 2mo ago
Slightly off topic, but Claude Code (and likely other models/harnesses) are incredibly effective at Nix. It can trivially self-verify, without side effects, which is a perfect match for an LLM. If you've ever been put off by the difficulty of the language, it's worth checking it out again with AI assistance.
- colordrops 2mo ago
  I've one-shotted custom distributions built with Nix using AI. It's crazy how well AI and Nix fit together.
- Loeffelmann 2mo ago
  I also love how with the right system prompt they can pull in tooling for what they currently need via a nix shell
  - sunaookami 2mo ago
    Also incredibly useful with "comma" so Claude can directly use tools that are not installed yet or only one-off: https://github.com/nix-community/comma https://github.com/nix-community/comma
- graham33 2mo ago
  Agreed, Claude has helped a lot with this project, and being able to iterate without side effects for system configuration changes is really a game changer for agents.
- aomix 2mo ago
  I got curious one Saturday and ported our monorepo to use Nix for build and test and release. It was a very pleasant process. I had to put aside to tackle more pressing things but I'm all in on using Nix in that capacity.
- HellsMaddy 2mo ago
  Absolutely. Running NixOS is a wonderful experience for this reason. NixOS + LLMs make it a breeze to make changes to your system, install and configure new software, and debug issues. Having every aspect of your system defined in a git repo is the perfect fit for agent harnesses. I'll admit, even with LLMs to help, the Nix language and NixOS did have a rather steep learning curve, because it's quite different from anything I'd experienced before. But after getting the hang of it, I can't imagine going back to a "normal" OS and I'm very happy I put in the time to get over the initial friction.
mkagenius 2mo ago
There is also a microvm.nix project which helped us support sandboxes with firecracker. So, whole ai workflow pipeline can now be nixos.
legastenigga 2mo ago
[dead]

132 points by graham33 2mo ago

hamza7159 2mo ago

[dead]

nixie-tubes 2mo ago

This has been amazingly helpful for managing my DGX Spark! Thank you for all your time and effort into this project!

graham33 2mo ago
Good to hear, thanks!

redrove 2mo ago

Been running this on a few Asus GX10 machines with k3s on top, it’s been great. I’m running the new deepseek. Thank you for your work!

pixelesque 2mo ago
What quant are you using, and what tps are you getting with K3?
- redrove 2mo ago
  The FP8 version from DeepSeek themselves [0], around 1800 tps prefill and 45 tokens per second decode. I’ve been running a custom VLLM image with b12x as well as nvfp4_ds_mla. I would say it’s quite fantastic in day to day, I use it mostly in Hermes and sometimes for coding. I have qwen 3.6 27b on an rtx 6000 pro as well so I use that as a workhorse in pi with DS as a reviewer/planner. [0] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V4-Flash-0731 Edit: I think you may have misread my post. k3s is NOT kimi k3, and I did mention I was running deepseek.
  - pixelesque 2mo ago
    Thanks - yeah, sorry, I mis-read that as you using both DS and K3...
    - reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
      I'm doing K3 with SoL kernels, zero hassle, myelin to sweep up the crap, on shot deploy to vast or runpods. Free to the community. I have to do like, low paying web dev to fund it, so I can't promise timelines, but it's coming and it will be free to anyone and fast as fuck. I estimate about 20 bucks an hour at current spot rates in the hundreds if not thousands of tokens per second.
      - reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
        @pg @dang you're asking me how a watch works. let's just try to keep an eye on the time. federal felony prosecution.
    - redrove 2mo ago
      No worries! Would love to run K3 but lack the hardware for a 2.8T model, like most people.
reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
i also used nixos as the base, but i went a little overboard with it, this is 7.1.2 supporting all devices and a custom driver that fixes the UMA page leak issues, and the wallpapers are all kernels at or above parity with what you can get out of the box. i'm not quite ready to OSS the whole thing, it's got a few rough edges, but if anyone wants to alpha test, caveat emptor and it's yours. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mCUZ9XHIogw https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mCUZ9XHIogw
- ianlevesque 2mo ago
  A fix for the leaks would be great. I’m rebooting them way too often when iterating.
  - reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
    https://cdn.s4.gl/0001-Avoid-allocations-in-system-memory-page-free-path.patch https://cdn.s4.gl/0001-Avoid-allocations-in-system-memory-pa...
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- reinitctxoffset 2mo ago
  That short got like, way more views than I thought. This is a little more of the complex plane math. https://youtu.be/WXcElxvSevM?si=HHbnzSNddIcPGCll https://youtu.be/WXcElxvSevM?si=HHbnzSNddIcPGCll
- redrove 2mo ago
  I’d be happy to test this out if you want to publish an alpha branch or something.
neobrain 2mo ago
Just curious, has suspend (to RAM) been working for you? For me the nvidia driver just keeps waking up the system instantly - but my setup is deviating from the upstream flake in a few ways, so I'm just wondering if it's worth setting up the system from scratch if it's working for other people. Other than that, can fully second that the flake is working great. Only gotcha is that CUDA-enabled packages (including Firefox) require using the flox binary cache unless you want to compile them from source, but then the package versions can lag behind a bit (and debugging nix cache issues is surprisingly difficult).

thenobsta 2mo ago

This is incredible. I have a Jetson lying around and will try to it out on this. I use it to play with vision models, not LLMs, and have been wanting a better way to manage the machine.

reasonabl_human 2mo ago
you probably want this if you have a jetson vs this spark repo: https://github.com/anduril/jetpack-nixos https://github.com/anduril/jetpack-nixos

haunter 2mo ago

Thanks for sharing, saving this for when I get a DGX Spark

ronef 2mo ago

Huge plus to anyone interested in the space to check out what Graham built here! If anyone is also interested on Nix/CUDA/Capital Markets/Flox, we recently did another case study in the space - https://flox.dev/blog/deploying-hardened-flox-nvidia-cuda-stacks-in-minutes-not-hours/ https://flox.dev/blog/deploying-hardened-flox-nvidia-cuda-st...

hamandcheese 2mo ago

Slightly off topic, but Claude Code (and likely other models/harnesses) are incredibly effective at Nix. It can trivially self-verify, without side effects, which is a perfect match for an LLM. If you've ever been put off by the difficulty of the language, it's worth checking it out again with AI assistance.

colordrops 2mo ago
I've one-shotted custom distributions built with Nix using AI. It's crazy how well AI and Nix fit together.
Loeffelmann 2mo ago
I also love how with the right system prompt they can pull in tooling for what they currently need via a nix shell
- sunaookami 2mo ago
  Also incredibly useful with "comma" so Claude can directly use tools that are not installed yet or only one-off: https://github.com/nix-community/comma https://github.com/nix-community/comma
graham33 2mo ago
Agreed, Claude has helped a lot with this project, and being able to iterate without side effects for system configuration changes is really a game changer for agents.
aomix 2mo ago
I got curious one Saturday and ported our monorepo to use Nix for build and test and release. It was a very pleasant process. I had to put aside to tackle more pressing things but I'm all in on using Nix in that capacity.
HellsMaddy 2mo ago
Absolutely. Running NixOS is a wonderful experience for this reason. NixOS + LLMs make it a breeze to make changes to your system, install and configure new software, and debug issues. Having every aspect of your system defined in a git repo is the perfect fit for agent harnesses. I'll admit, even with LLMs to help, the Nix language and NixOS did have a rather steep learning curve, because it's quite different from anything I'd experienced before. But after getting the hang of it, I can't imagine going back to a "normal" OS and I'm very happy I put in the time to get over the initial friction.

mkagenius 2mo ago

There is also a microvm.nix project which helped us support sandboxes with firecracker. So, whole ai workflow pipeline can now be nixos.

legastenigga 2mo ago

[dead]