Hello everyoone,
I have a question about Nvidia drivers and runtimes.
Does the org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-xxx flatpak updates handle the system graphics driver updates? I have noticed I get a new flatpak update more often than rpm-ostree updates. I know the system does not have to be restarted after flatpak updates.
Why does Nvidia flatpaks update more often, but rpm-ostree do not?
I’m looking for more clarity as to whats happening here. Are they the same?
The nvidia runtime extension is only used inside the flatpak sandbox.
I think the behavior you’re seeing is this: Flatpak downloads every nvidia driver from flathub at every update · Issue #42 · flathub/org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia · GitHub
From what I can tell, every time a new driver version is added (including betas), all versions are redownloaded. For example, you can look at the history for the current stable driver version:
flatpak remote-info --log flathub org.freedesktop.Platform.GL.nvidia-535-113-01
Since it was released on 2023-09-21, there have been four additional commits, none of which were actually for that version.
This wouldn’t be such a big problem except that flatpak’s extra-data mechanism is being used to avoid redistributing NVIDIA’s binaries. That means flatpak on your machine is downloading the .run file directly from NVIDIA, and bypassing all of the OSTree file deduplication and delta update magic.
NVIDIA has confirmed that redistribution is permissible in this case, but the extension has not yet been changed to take advantage of that:
Thank you for the response.
That explains it. Seems I get four Nvidia flatpak updates compared to one rpm-ostree updates.