At long last, users of NVIDIA graphics cards can enjoy a drastically improved user experience with AlmaLinux.
When AlmaLinux started just 5 years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible. However, with NVIDIA releasing an open source version of their graphics drivers, things changed. This open source version is slowly becoming the flagship driver, with new products being added exclusively to it.
AlmaLinux’s NVIDIA support - including Secure Boot
AlmaLinux OS 9 and 10 now ship packages enabling native NVIDIA Open GPU driver support - with Secure Boot. Thanks to ALESCo, the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel module, and this approved RFC, AlmaLinux 9 and 10 solve many pain points of NVIDIA users by shipping NVIDIA’s open source graphics driver as a kernel module, along with a repository config for many of the common userspace and CUDA components. With AlmaLinux 9 and 10 and the new NVIDIA packages, a few dnf commands are all that stand between users and a fully-integrated NVIDIA experience.
How to take advantage of this update
Getting started is easy! You just install the release package and then the modules and you’re all set.
Full documentation is available at https://wiki.almalinux.org/documentation/nvidia.html with a quick getting started excerpt below.
Installing NVIDIA Drivers for AlmaLinux OS 9, 10, and Kitten 10
First, install the package holding the NVIDIA driver and repository configurations:
dnf install almalinux-release-nvidia-driver
Next, install the driver package:
dnf install nvidia-open-kmod nvidia-driver
It’s recommended to reboot your system now, which will load the driver automatically on the next boot. Alternatively, if you’re booted into the latest kernel, you can load the kernel module with the modprobe utility
modprobe nvidia_drm
The easiest way to confirm functionality is with the nvidia-smi utility. This is provided by the nvidia-driver-cuda package.
dnf install nvidia-driver-cuda
nvidia-smi
You can confirm the module is loaded correctly with this command:
# nvidia-smi
Tue May 27 21:33:53 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.153.02 Driver Version: 570.153.02 CUDA Version: 12.8 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA L4 Off | 00000000:31:00.0 Off | 0 |
| N/A 26C P8 11W / 72W | 0MiB / 23034MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| No running processes found |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
If you also want the CUDA stack you can get that as follows:
dnf install cuda
