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Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

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Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#21

Post by dhon_ »

HellsMaddy wrote: post #17
hamandcheese wrote: post #11

Slightly off topic, but Claude Code (and likely other models/harnesses) are incredibly effective at Nix. It can trivially self-verify, without side effects, which is a perfect match for an LLM. If you've ever been put off by the difficulty of the language, it's worth checking it out again with AI assistance.

Absolutely. Running NixOS is a wonderful experience for this reason. NixOS + LLMs make it a breeze to make changes to your system, install and configure new software, and debug issues. Having every aspect of your system defined in a git repo is the perfect fit for agent harnesses. I'll admit, even with LLMs to help, the Nix language and NixOS did have a rather steep learning curve, because it's quite different from a…

You can also push deployments to remote systems which is great for servers and headless devices like raspberry pis. I use colmena and deploy-rs on different projects because they have some nice features but you can also do it with bare nix.

I have a repo for kiosk appliances that can build an SD card image for a specific device in a fleet (so no on device configuration is required) but it can also push out updates or changes at runtime. NixOS isn't perfect for embedded devices yet but works well for cases like this in my experience.

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#22

Post by sunaookami »

Loeffelmann wrote: post #13
hamandcheese wrote: post #11

Slightly off topic, but Claude Code (and likely other models/harnesses) are incredibly effective at Nix. It can trivially self-verify, without side effects, which is a perfect match for an LLM. If you've ever been put off by the difficulty of the language, it's worth checking it out again with AI assistance.

I also love how with the right system prompt they can pull in tooling for what they currently need via a nix shell

Also incredibly useful with "comma" so Claude can directly use tools that are not installed yet or only one-off: https://github.com/nix-community/comma

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#23

Post by miki123211 »

hamandcheese wrote: post #11

Slightly off topic, but Claude Code (and likely other models/harnesses) are incredibly effective at Nix. It can trivially self-verify, without side effects, which is a perfect match for an LLM. If you've ever been put off by the difficulty of the language, it's worth checking it out again with AI assistance.

And to add to that, LLMs start with fresh context on each conversation, so they don't have the understanding of your system that human employees do. Nix lets you naturally encode that understanding in code (and in comments), making sure it never drifts from what the state of the system really is.

I never saw much point in Nix, but if you put it like that... now I want to try.

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#24

Post by sohrob »

hamandcheese wrote: post #11

Slightly off topic, but Claude Code (and likely other models/harnesses) are incredibly effective at Nix. It can trivially self-verify, without side effects, which is a perfect match for an LLM. If you've ever been put off by the difficulty of the language, it's worth checking it out again with AI assistance.

I set up my homelab server running NixOS entirely using Claude and what would have likely taken me months (if not years) doing it the old fashioned way, got reduced to a few hours of back and forth iteration.

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#25

Post by reinitctxoffset »

redrove wrote: post #4

Been running this on a few Asus GX10 machines with k3s on top, it’s been great. I’m running the new deepseek. Thank you for your work!

i also used nixos as the base, but i went a little overboard with it, this is 7.1.2 supporting all devices and a custom driver that fixes the UMA page leak issues, and the wallpapers are all kernels at or above parity with what you can get out of the box.

i'm not quite ready to OSS the whole thing, it's got a few rough edges, but if anyone wants to alpha test, caveat emptor and it's yours.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/mCUZ9XHIogw

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#26

Post by ianlevesque »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #25
redrove wrote: post #4

Been running this on a few Asus GX10 machines with k3s on top, it’s been great. I’m running the new deepseek. Thank you for your work!

i also used nixos as the base, but i went a little overboard with it, this is 7.1.2 supporting all devices and a custom driver that fixes the UMA page leak issues, and the wallpapers are all kernels at or above parity with what you can get out of the box. i'm not quite ready to OSS the whole thing, it's got a few rough edges, but if anyone wants to alpha test, caveat emptor and it's yours. https://www.youtube.com/sho…

A fix for the leaks would be great. I’m rebooting them way too often when iterating.

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#27

Post by [deleted] »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #25
redrove wrote: post #4

Been running this on a few Asus GX10 machines with k3s on top, it’s been great. I’m running the new deepseek. Thank you for your work!

i also used nixos as the base, but i went a little overboard with it, this is 7.1.2 supporting all devices and a custom driver that fixes the UMA page leak issues, and the wallpapers are all kernels at or above parity with what you can get out of the box. i'm not quite ready to OSS the whole thing, it's got a few rough edges, but if anyone wants to alpha test, caveat emptor and it's yours. https://www.youtube.com/sho…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#28

Post by reinitctxoffset »

ianlevesque wrote: post #26
reinitctxoffset wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i also used nixos as the base, but i went a little overboard with it, this is 7.1.2 supporting all devices and a custom driver that fixes the UMA page leak issues, and the wallpapers are all kernels at or above parity with what you can get out of the box. i'm not quite ready to OSS the whole thing, it's got a few rough edges, but if anyone wants to alpha test, caveat emptor and it's yours. https://www.youtube.com/sho…

A fix for the leaks would be great. I’m rebooting them way too often when iterating.

https://cdn.s4.gl/0001-Avoid-allocations-in-system-memory-pa...

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#29

Post by reinitctxoffset »

reinitctxoffset wrote: post #25
redrove wrote: post #4

Been running this on a few Asus GX10 machines with k3s on top, it’s been great. I’m running the new deepseek. Thank you for your work!

i also used nixos as the base, but i went a little overboard with it, this is 7.1.2 supporting all devices and a custom driver that fixes the UMA page leak issues, and the wallpapers are all kernels at or above parity with what you can get out of the box. i'm not quite ready to OSS the whole thing, it's got a few rough edges, but if anyone wants to alpha test, caveat emptor and it's yours. https://www.youtube.com/sho…

That short got like, way more views than I thought. This is a little more of the complex plane math.

https://youtu.be/WXcElxvSevM?si=HHbnzSNddIcPGCll

Re: Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark

#30

Post by reinitctxoffset »

pixelesque wrote: post #15
redrove wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The FP8 version from DeepSeek themselves [0], around 1800 tps prefill and 45 tokens per second decode. I’ve been running a custom VLLM image with b12x as well as nvfp4_ds_mla. I would say it’s quite fantastic in day to day, I use it mostly in Hermes and sometimes for coding. I have qwen 3.6 27b on an rtx 6000 pro as well so I use that as a workhorse in pi with DS as a reviewer/planner. [0] https://huggingface.co/deep…

Thanks - yeah, sorry, I mis-read that as you using both DS and K3...

I'm doing K3 with SoL kernels, zero hassle, myelin to sweep up the crap, on shot deploy to vast or runpods. Free to the community.

I have to do like, low paying web dev to fund it, so I can't promise timelines, but it's coming and it will be free to anyone and fast as fuck.

I estimate about 20 bucks an hour at current spot rates in the hundreds if not thousands of tokens per second.

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