Install Nvidia Drivers on Silverblue

Nvidia drivers on Fedora Silverblue

In a recent Distro Delves episode, I made the incorrect assumption that installing Nvidia drivers on Fedora Silverblue is an ambitious and difficult endeavor based on blog posts and instructions I had read.

As it turns out, I was wrong.

How-To

Starting with Fedora Silverblue 30, the method of installing Nvidia drivers is functionally the same as on Fedora Workstation with a couple of minor changes due to Silverblue’s file system.

First, enable the RPM Fusion repos for Silverblue:

rpm-ostree install https://download1.rpmfusion.org/free/fedora/rpmfusion-free-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm https://download1.rpmfusion.org/nonfree/fedora/rpmfusion-nonfree-release-$(rpm -E %fedora).noarch.rpm

Since this modifies the file system layer, you need to reboot to “activate” these changes.

Next, install the Nvidia driver:

rpm-ostree install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia
rpm-ostree install akmod-nvidia xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda

And lastly, blacklist the nouveau driver (this part might be optional):

rpm-ostree kargs --append=rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau --append=modprobe.blacklist=nouveau --append=nvidia-drm.modeset=1

That’s it?

As of June 8th, 2020, this is all that is required to get Nvidia drivers working on Fedora Silverblue.

Your mileage with these steps may vary depending on your hardware but for the majority of use cases, this should get you set up with the latest Nvidia drivers + CUDA support.

The steps in this article were lifted from the RPM Fusion instructions here.

The Silverblue Experience