Blackwell Meets Proxmox: When 'Open' Nvidia Drivers Still Refuse to Load

There's a special kind of frustration that only shows up when everything should work. You've got the hardware seated properly. The BIOS looks clean. Secure Boot is off. Nouveau is blacklisted. The installer finishes. The progress bar hits 100 percent. For a brief moment, you think you're done. Then Proxmox drops the hammer: unable to load the kernel module. That's the moment a lot of people hit recently after dropping Nvidia's new Blackwell-based GPUs—like the 5060 and 5060 Ti—into Proxmox 9.1 systems. On paper, this is supposed to be the easy era. Nvidia now offers "open" kernel modules. Proxmox documents which driver versions to use. Kernel regressions are supposedly understood. And yet, here we are, staring at nvidia.ko refusing to exist. This isn't one person missing a step. It's a pattern. ## The promise of "open" Nvidia drivers Blackwell GPUs landed with a quiet but important shift. Nvidia's newer cards lean heavily on the MIT/GPL "open" kernel driver path, rather than the classic proprietary module that Linux users have wrestled with for years. In theory, this should be a win. Better kernel compatibility. Fewer DKMS headaches. Less friction when kernels move fast, which Proxmox absolutely does. And to be fair, plenty of people are running 50-series cards just fine. Some are even doing it on newer kernels than Proxmox officially blesses. Same drivers. Same installer. Same MIT/GPL option selected. That's what makes the failures so confusing. ## When "supported" doesn't mean "working" In the cases that keep popping up, the story usually looks the same: A fresh Proxmox 9.1 install. A Blackwell GPU. Nvidia's recommended 580-series driver runfile. Installer completes without obvious errors. Then the module refuses to load. modprobe nvidia comes back with nothing helpful. lsmod shows no nouveau, no nvidia, nothing competing for the device. The logs, however, tell a more ominous story: ``` request_mem_region failed for 64M @ 0xd0000000 ``` That line is the real villain. It usually points to another driver already owning the GPU's memory region. Nouveau is the usual suspect, but in these setups it's already blacklisted and gone from initramfs. Secure Boot is disabled. There's no rivatv relic lurking in the background. Still, the Nvidia driver probes the device and bounces off. At that point, the installer helpfully suggests the usual causes—wrong kernel headers, mismatched GCC version, unsupported GPU—none of which actually explain what's happening. ## Kernel roulette doesn't always save you One of the first instincts is to blame the kernel. Proxmox itself flags issues with newer kernel branches, and many users immediately downgrade from 6.17 to 6.14. That works for some people. For others, nothing changes. The driver compiles against the correct kernel. The headers match. The system is definitely booted into the same kernel version it built against. And yet, /lib/modules/$(uname -r) never gets a usable nvidia.ko. This is where the experience turns from "Linux troubleshooting" into something more existential. You've checked every box. You've followed the docs. The system agrees with you on every factual point—and still refuses to cooperate. ## VFIO complicates things more than it should Dig a little deeper into the logs and another clue keeps popping up: VFIO messages interleaved with Nvidia's failures. That matters. A lot of Proxmox users aren't installing Nvidia drivers just for display. They want GPU sharing for containers, CUDA workloads, or passthrough experiments. VFIO gets involved early, and in some setups, it looks like it's claiming parts of the device before the Nvidia driver ever gets a fair shot. Even when you're not explicitly passing the GPU through to a VM, Proxmox's configuration and boot order can put VFIO in the driver race earlier than expected. The result is a bizarre stalemate where nothing appears to own the GPU, but the Nvidia driver still can't claim its memory regions. ## The MIT/GPL choice isn't optional anymore One thing that is clear: Blackwell cards simply won't work with the old proprietary kernel module. If you're not selecting the MIT/GPL option during installation, you're dead in the water. Most people in this situation are selecting it correctly. The installer prompts them. They choose the open driver. It still fails. That's important, because it rules out the most obvious mistake and reinforces how narrow the problem space actually is. ## Why some systems work and others don't This is where the conversation gets uncomfortable. People with nearly identical setups report wildly different outcomes. Same GPU. Same Proxmox version. Same driver build. One machine boots clean with CUDA available. Another hits the same kernel error every time. The difference often comes down to system history. Long-lived Proxmox hosts with years of kernel upgrades, hardware swaps, and leftover configuration files seem more likely to hit these issues. Fresh installs behave better. Not always—but often enough to notice the pattern. It's not a satisfying answer, but it's a familiar one. Linux systems accumulate state. Initramfs hooks, modprobe configs, and bootloader fragments stick around long after their original purpose is gone. Eventually, a new GPU shows up and trips over something invisible. ## The reinstall nobody wants to do Several people who hit this wall eventually admit the same thing: the system probably needs a clean reinstall. Not because Proxmox is broken. Not because Nvidia's drivers are unusable. But because the interaction between fast-moving kernels, VFIO, and Nvidia's transition to open modules leaves very little margin for historical cruft. That's a brutal conclusion for a hypervisor. Proxmox machines aren't laptops you casually wipe on a Sunday afternoon. They run storage, VMs, networks, and workloads that took years to shape. And yet, for some Blackwell users, a reinstall is the only thing that finally makes modprobe nvidia stop complaining. ## This is the cost of living on the edge None of this means Blackwell GPUs are a bad choice for Proxmox. In fact, once they work, they seem to work well. Multi-GPU setups mixing 30-series, 40-series, and 50-series cards are out there, running inference jobs and container workloads without issue. But it does mean the "open driver" era hasn't magically erased the complexity of Nvidia on Linux. It's shifted the pain points, not eliminated them. Proxmox moves fast. Kernels move faster. Nvidia is mid-transition between driver models. VFIO is powerful but unforgiving. Stack those together, and you get exactly this kind of failure: silent, confusing, and deeply annoying. ## Where this leaves Proxmox users If you're planning to drop a Blackwell GPU into a Proxmox 9.1 host, the lesson isn't "don't do it." It's "go in with your eyes open." Start clean if you can. Be deliberate about VFIO configuration. Double-check which kernel you're actually booting. Expect that the installer finishing successfully doesn't mean the driver will load. And if you hit that dreaded kernel module error after doing everything right, don't assume you're missing something obvious. Sometimes, the system really is just tangled. That's the uncomfortable truth of running cutting-edge hardware on a hypervisor that's sprinting forward alongside it. The future shows up early—but it doesn't always arrive politely.