I recently installed the NVIDIA drivers on my new Debian system and have been experimenting with different kernel versions. I noticed that kernel 6.17 seems to be newer than what the current Debian-packaged driver supports. I’m not very experienced with Linux kernel and driver release, so I wanted to ask a few things:
Have I made any mistakes in how I installed the NVIDIA drivers? I’m running Debian 13 (Trixie) with the backported 6.17 kernel, so I’m assuming this version might simply be too new for the driver/NVIDIA DKMS to build correctly.
I’m also a bit confused about versioning: Debian’s repositories provide NVIDIA driver version 550, but here on the forum I see mentions of driver versions up to 590, and the production branch seems to be around 580. Is this a Debian packaging delay, or is there something I’m misunderstanding about how these versions are distributed?
If this isn’t an installation issue, is there any general expectation for when a driver update might support kernel 6.17?
There are 3 major ways Nvidia drivers are packaged for Debian, see the details on the Debian wiki.
Debian generally packages only LTS versions, so 535, 550 and probably soon they will also add 580.
I’m on 6.17.8 from trixie-backports as well and 590 (still in beta) from the Nvidia DC repo works fine for me. Previously I was using 580 from the DC repo for Debian-12 and it was also working fine with this kernel (the DC repo for D-13 have been created just a few days ago).
How exactly have you tried to install the driver and what sort of problems are you experiencing exactly? Please consider attaching a bug report file.
Now it’s clear: kernel 6.16+ requires Nvidia driver 580+ due to changes in some header files and you attempted to install 550 from the Debian repos on 6.17 from trixie-backports, so it failed to compile as expected.
You have a few options here:
use the default 6.12 kernel and driver v550 from the Debian repos
stay at 6.17 and install v590 from the mentioned Nvidia DC apt repos (follow the instructions for Debian-12 from the official docs just replacing $(distro) with debian13)
Whichever way you decide, first make sure to clean the current mess with apt-get --autoremove purge '*nvidia*' '*nvidia*:i386' '*cuda*' '*cuda*:i386'
Hope this helps :)
UPDATE:
you didn’t mention what GPU you have: support for Maxwell, Pascal and Volta is discontinued since v590, so if you have an older GPU (like GTX 10xx or older), then you need to use v580 (or earlier) and choose proprietary modules flavor.
when installing from the Debian repos, you should follow the exact instructions from the wiki: adding components, installing headers, finally installing nvidia-driver + firmware + open/proprietary modules, NOT just installing nvidia-smi and hoping that all the rest will be somehow properly pulled-in also.
PS: I’ve added a warning to the wiki, so others will not fall into the same trap.
For anyone coming here in the (near) future: I’ve just noticed that there’s a corresponding version 550.163.01-4~bpo13+1 in trixie-backports: it is possible that it was patched to work with kernels 6.16+, but I haven’t verified it (I’ve added yet another note to the wiki though ;-] ).
UPDATE:proprietary flavor of 550.163.01-4~bpo13+1 indeed compiles correctly on the 6.17 kernel from trixie-backports. Open flavor still fails. The wiki has been updated accordingly.