This tool tries to solve the "OpenGL" problem on nix.

Motivation

You use Nix on any distribution, and any GL application installed fails with this error:

$ program
libGL error: unable to load driver: i965_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: i965
libGL error: unable to load driver: i965_dri.so
libGL error: driver pointer missing
libGL error: failed to load driver: i965
libGL error: unable to load driver: swrast_dri.so
libGL error: failed to load driver: swrast

This library contains a wrapper which is able to launch GL application:

nixGLXXX program

Installation / Usage

Clone this git repository:

git clone https://github.com/guibou/nixGL

Build / install

cd nixGL
nix-build -A XXX
nix-env -i ./result

XXX can be one of:

• nixGLNvidia: Nvidia driver without bumblebee
• nixGLNvidiaBumblebee: Nvidia driver with bumblebee
• nixGLIntel: Intel driver

Usage

nixGLXXX program args

For example (on my dual GPU laptop):

$ nixGLIntel glxinfo | grep -i 'OpenGL version string'
OpenGL version string: 3.0 Mesa 17.3.3
$ nixGLNvidiaBumblebee glxinfo | grep -i 'OpenGL version string'
OpenGL version string: 4.6.0 NVIDIA 390.25

Limitations

The idea is really simple and should work reliably in most cases. It can be easily extended to AMD drivers, I just don't have the hardware to test. Contact me.

Important: You need an host system driver which match the nixpkgs one. For example, at the time of this writing, nixpkgs contains nvidia 390.25. Your host system must contain the same version. This limitation can be lifted by using a different version of nixpkgs:

export NIX_PATH=nixpkgs=https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs-channels/archive/nixos-14.12.tar.gz
nix-build -A nixGLNvidia

Contact me if this limitation is too important, it may be easy to automate this process.