Currently no Debian-packaged driver supports Blackwell GPUs (for example RTX 50xx), which limits Debian adoption on newer hardware.
Version 580 supports Blackwell, compiles without problems on kernels 6.16+ and is also the last one supporting Maxwell, Pascal and Volta GPUs and as such will receive a LTS from Nvidia. Therefore it seems like a good candidate for Debian packaging.

Thanks!

How did you manage to compile without problems on such kernels?  Trying on
version 6.12 on debian 13 yields these problems:

  MODPOST

Source NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-570.207

This was the first package that did not cause a problem with CDUA

I'm running Debian Forky.

I had a failed attempt to install
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-580.126.09.run
after that complained about existing Debain nvidia packages,
and telling me that I would have to install and configure
the linux-source package.

I installed the linux kernel source package
linux-source-6.17.tar.xz
to /usr/src

then had to ensure that the nouveau module was not getting
loaded even by the bootloader.

installed ncurses ncurses-dev pkg-config

then ran make menuconfig

I decidied not to risk configuring any of the components,
hence this took about four hours to compile, mostly
because of the wireless modules.

running make produced
linux-image-6.17.13_6.17.13-3_amd64.deb
linux-image-6.17.13-dbg_6.17.13-3_amd64.deb
linux-libc-dev_6.17.13-3_amd64.deb
linux-headers-6.17.13_6.17.13-3_amd64.deb

exercising caution, I ran only
dpkg -i linux-image-6.17.13_6.17.13-3_amd64.deb

and later found that gave problems with glxserver_nvidia

hence all of the packages got installed.

Running the nvidia install package needs something like

NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-580.126.09.run --kernel-source-path /usr/src/linux-source-6.17

and it is preferable to avoid nvidia attempting to mess with your Xorg stuff.

It is necessary to boot into your custom kernel which you compiled
to get the NVIDIA package to run.

I found that the package
NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-570.207.run
was the earliest package that didn't give problems.

Hope that helps.

Hopefully I am doing this correctly; I don't quite understand Debian's bug tracker system.
Yes, we could do with a newer NVIDIA driver, at least in the backports repo! The 580 driver is an objective improvement over 550 in every way, from stability, to Wayland support, to sleep behaviour, and of course performance. 580 as I understand is an LTS driver too, so it should fit fine with the backports (if not the main Trixie branch).

I'm using nvidia-open-580.126.20 from NVIDIA's cuda repo[1] and it
builds fine with dkms against Linux 6.12 from trixie stable.

But since NVIDIA's cuda repo uses outdated signing for their packages
I'd be more than happy to see 580 in the backports.

[1]
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/debian12/x86_64/

I saw this new repository, maybe it fixes the outdated signing?
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/debian13/x86_64/

Paul

I have not tried that repository, however the Debian 12 CUDA repo still works on Debian 13 if you add the following to /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/25keypolicy

APT::Key::GPGVCommand "1";

Is this advisable? Probably not. However the Debian 12 CUDA repo is still more flexible as it contains the 580 drivers, which are the final NVIDIA drivers to support Pascal and Maxwell GPU's. Unfortunately, the Debian 13 CUDA repo only contains the 590 series of drivers.