Show HN: NixOS-DGX-Spark – Nix and NixOS on the DGX Spark • Hacker News Board

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

#41

Post by JamesSwift » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 1:09 PM UTC

bergkvist wrote: post #31

dhon_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are using an Apple Silicon laptop and you want to deploy to an x86-64 Linux box, this can get a bit annoying due needing to deal with cross compilation in nix.

You can easily spin up a linux builder vm or I just have a dedicated remote builder on my network which I offload to

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

#42

Post by redrove » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 1:24 PM UTC

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...

No worries! Would love to run K3 but lack the hardware for a 2.8T model, like most people.

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

#43

Post by diarrhea » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 3:10 PM UTC

bergkvist wrote: post #31

dhon_ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If you are using an Apple Silicon laptop and you want to deploy to an x86-64 Linux box, this can get a bit annoying due needing to deal with cross compilation in nix.

The Make target I use to deploy in this manner (MacBook to x86-64, single machine) is simply:

    server:
        @echo "Deploying machine (with ssh-agent forwarding): '$(MACHINE)'"
        NIX_SSHOPTS="-A" \
        nix run nixpkgs#nixos-rebuild -- switch \
        --flake .#$(MACHINE) \
        --target-host $(MACHINE).$(DOMAIN) \
        --build-host $(MACHINE).$(DOMAIN) \
        --no-reexec \
        --verbose \
        --sudo

Which has been working well. I admit I do not understand what all of these flags do in detail.

This uses ssh agent forwarding, and then sudo via PAM. That allows for passwordless sudo. Building (well, activating) without sudo is pretty involved last I checked, I could not get it to work.

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

#44

Post by glaslong » Mon, Aug 03, 2026, 4:52 PM UTC

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.

This. One of the surprising delights of coding models has been trivially reworking my homelab into proxmox and nixos. It's a very good testable, repeatable flow for LLMs.