The official update guide recommends using the DGX Dashboard for all system updates. This has never worked for me, maybe because we modified the Spark into a multi-user workstation. In any case, I needed a CLI approach to upgrade the driver. Information on how to do this is absent from the official documentation and standard NVIDIA driver-install procedures appear not appropriate for the Spark. The following solution cleanly upgrades all 580 driver packages to 590. The following is curated Claude output. I verified the upgrade worked as described below. (You can verify what apt will install and remove by adding --dry-run as an option.)
Documented CLI Method — and its limitation
The user guide’s documented manual CLI procedure is:
sudo apt update
sudo apt dist-upgrade
sudo fwupdmgr refresh
sudo fwupdmgr upgrade
sudo reboot
However, this does not upgrade the GPU driver. The dist-upgrade step will upgrade general system packages but will not transition from nvidia-driver-580-open to nvidia-driver-590-open.
Why standard NVIDIA driver upgrade methods don’t apply
NVIDIA’s driver installation guide and most forum advice assumes the driver comes from the NVIDIA CUDA repository. On the DGX Spark this is not the case.
The Spark uses a tightly coupled kernel+driver architecture where the GPU kernel modules are pre-built into Ubuntu’s linux-nvidia kernel flavour and delivered via noble-updates/restricted — not via DKMS or NVIDIA’s CUDA repo. In fact, the DGX factory configuration explicitly pins all driver packages from the CUDA repo to priority -1 (never install) via /etc/apt/preferences.d/cuda-compute-repo-lowpri*, precisely to prevent the CUDA repo driver from being installed.
This means:
sudo apt install nvidia-openpulls from the CUDA repo — wrong on DGX Spark- DKMS-based approaches don’t apply — kernel modules are pre-built
Correct CLI upgrade from 580 to 590
(Note: I have manually verified that this works as intended on an NVIDIA DGX Spark).
First run general system updates:
sudo apt full-upgrade
sudo reboot
Then upgrade the GPU driver:
sudo apt install \
nvidia-driver-590-open \
linux-modules-nvidia-590-open-nvidia-hwe-24.04 \
nvidia-prime-
sudo apt autoremove
sudo reboot
The nvidia-prime- trailing minus excludes nvidia-prime, which is not required and not factory-installed either.
After reboot, verify with:
nvidia-smi # should report 590.48.01
To revert to 580 if needed:
(Note: since the upgrade was successful for me, I have not manually verified that this fully reverts to the original state).
sudo apt install \
nvidia-driver-580-open \
linux-modules-nvidia-580-open-nvidia-hwe-24.04 \
nvidia-prime-
sudo apt autoremove
sudo reboot
Hope this helps others needing to do a CLI driver update.