Making musl and proprietary NVIDIA drivers work together

The piece describes Chimera Linux’s effort to make NVIDIA’s proprietary graphics drivers run on a musl-based system, where the drivers’ glibc assumptions normally prevent proper operation. Support is particularly important for older cards: NVIDIA’s free Nouveau/NVK drivers can be much slower, and Maxwell/Pascal cards cannot raise their clocks without unreleased firmware. Chimera has working, though not yet finished, pull requests for NVIDIA’s 580 and 620 driver branches on x86_64 and aarch64. The author argues that stock musl is not sufficient and outlines the compatibility changes needed.

First, Chimera adopted GLVND, NVIDIA’s vendor-neutral OpenGL dispatch system, rebuilding Mesa to use it. The driver also needs gcompat to provide glibc symbols; its latest development revision supplies symbols missing from the tagged release. Packaging uses patchelf to remove or replace glibc library dependencies and add gcompat. A remaining relocation error came from GNU IFUNC, which musl deliberately does not support; Chimera adapted an Alpaquita musl patch to handle the required relocation and packages the result as musl-nvidia. Even after these steps, the driver exposes a thread-local-storage complication: its libraries use static TLS and x86_64 TPOFF64 relocations. The supplied material identifies this issue but does not show how it is resolved.