Sunday, April 12, 2026

nixos: enable nvidia in distrobox container using Nvidia Container Toolkit

What worked for me on nixos with docker (check nixos wiki on Nvidia and Nvidia Container Toolkit) was:

distrobox create -i archlinux -n archbox --additional-flags "--device=nvidia.com/gpu=all"
Then in the distrobox container you can check if nvidia is detected, using for example glxinfo. It should show: name of display: :0.0
display: :0 screen: 0
direct rendering: Yes
server glx vendor string: NVIDIA Corporation
server glx version string: 1.4
server glx extensions:

Put the following in nixos configuration file: hardware.nvidia-container-toolkit.enable = true;
virtualisation.docker.daemon.settings.features.cdi = true;