Hello. I’ve recently updated nixpkgs, and I’m unable to boot anymore. So many services are failing. I can’t log in to any TTYs, and lightdm doesn’t start. And looking through journalctl logs, here is perhaps a relevant error. It worked well before updating, but I’m not sure what’s wrong. I found an issue about this on github too, but unfortunately it’s unresolved and stale.
Apr 30 15:32:37 wolfburger kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nva8_fuc084 failed with error -2
Apr 30 15:32:37 wolfburger kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: Direct firmware load for nouveau/nva8_fuc084d failed with error -2
Apr 30 15:32:37 wolfburger kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: msvld: unable to load firmware data
Apr 30 15:32:37 wolfburger kernel: nouveau 0000:01:00.0: msvld: init failed, -19
Well, the issue is pretty clear, this comes down to something NixOS needs to implement for nouveau to work with your GPU, but the maintainer doesn’t have time for that.
Switch to the proprietary driver by setting services.xserver.videoDrivers to nvidia (or the correct name for your card, of course), or implement and upstream as the issue suggests.
My drivers are pretty old*, and nouveau works best with them. I don’t know why it required this module after updating, it worked fine before. I don’t remember exactly, but last time I tried on arch, the nvidia drivers didn’t work with mine, I think it’s pretty outdated. I’ll see if I can implement it.
I tried looking through nixpkgs commits, but I couldn’t find anything related to that specific module. It just doesn’t make sense to me, why wasn’t it required before?
nouveau is part of the kernel, so perhaps you’re using linux_latest and the updated pulled you a new kernel? Have you tried downgrading that with boot.kernelPackages?
Doesn’t necessarily have to be the case.
I lost my Wifi drivers for a few weeks due to some changes in the kernel on I only receive the usual changes for the kernel in the stable branch.