Soo, I’m considering a switch to Tumbleweed on my main workstation. I have already switched to Tumbleweed on my pure-Intel machine, but I can’t find any documentation for using DKMS with the Nvidia proprietary driver.
Anyone got more information? I’m not really fond of manually re-installing the driver with each update.
Sadly, there aren’t any official main repo packages for DKMS (I wish there was for running in a VBox VM). You’d have to install it from the X11:Bumblebee repo or one of the personal repos.
As to documentation, can’t help there, sorry.
It is available on Packman as well:
So if you add(ed) the Packman repo, you can just install it via YaST or zypper.
I never used DKMS myself, so cannot tell you what you have to do, but I think the nvidia driver should even detect it automatically on installation, I’m not sure though.
FYI, the nvidia-bumblebee package runs this after the installation to register the driver with dkms:
/usr/sbin/dkms add -m nvidia -v %{version} --rpm_safe_upgrade
/usr/sbin/dkms build -m nvidia -v %{version}
/usr/sbin/dkms install -m nvidia -v %{version}
But be aware that you will have to reinstall the nvidia driver after other (non-kernel) updates too, Mesa in particular. There’s no way around that.
And even with dkms, the nvidia driver might break after a kernel update, because the newest kernel might not be supported by nvidia yet.
As said above, don’t rely on dkms for Nvidia. With kernel (or Mesa, etc.) updates (4.x) usually comes the need to patch the Nvidia binary. Instead, learn how to install the binary “the hard way”, which isn’t at all hard, and pay attention to kernel updates as they appear in Tumbleweed. I’ve found that the best way to stay ahead of possible driver breakage is to read blogs like this: http://rglinuxtech.com/
Just build the RPMs from OBS, it’s the same as you would get with a released version. You need osc installed ( zypper in osc ), then
osc co X11:Drivers:Video nvidia-gfxG04
In that directory you will find a README file which explains how to build the RPMs. At the end, install everything except the src.rpm files and the kmp files for other kernel flavours ( e.g. -pv, -default ).
This still requires driver rebuild every now and then though as TW kernels cannot promise kABI stability (simply by the fact that you get new version every several weeks); but it does help with X11 updates that won’t mess up installation, and in my experience are much more difficult to recognize and fix.
And of course if new kernel breaks driver compilation you still have to wait until someone submits patch to fix it.
So it is not a silver bullet 
My driver was built on Fri 29 May 2015 09:12:52 PM EEST and I’ve had no problems since. So there is at least some stability.