setup

NVIDIA CUDA 9.x on Ubuntu 18.04 LST installation

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Guide

An installation guide to take you through the NVIDIA graphics driver as well as CUDA toolkit setup on an Ubuntu 18.04 LTS.

A. Know your cards

Verify what graphics card you have on your machine

rahul@karma:~$ lspci | grep VGA
04:00.0 VGA compatible controller: 
NVIDIA Corporation GM204 [GeForce GTX 970] (rev a1)
rahul@karma:~$ sudo lshw -C video
 *-display 
 description: VGA compatible controller
 product: GM204 [GeForce GTX 970]
 vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
 physical id: 0
 bus info: pci@0000:04:00.0
 version: a1
 width: 64 bits
 clock: 33MHz
 capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
 configuration: driver=nouveau latency=0
 resources: irq:30 memory:f2000000-f2ffffff memory:e0000000-efffffff memory:f0000000-f1ffffff ioport:2000(size=128) memory:f3080000-f30fffff

Download the right driver

downloaded the Version 390.67 for GeForce GTX 970

Screenshot from 2018-07-12 17-15-34.png

B. Nouveau problem kills your GPU rush

Hoever there are solutions available

Here is what worked for me

  1. remove all nvidia packages ,skip this if your system is fresh installed 
    sudo apt-get remove nvidia* && sudo apt autoremove
  2. install some packages for build kernel: 
    sudo apt-get install dkms build-essential linux-headers-generic
  3. now block and disable nouveau kernel driver: 
    sudo vim /etc/modprobe.d/nvidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf

Insert follow lines to the nvidia-installer-disable-nouveau.conf:

blacklist nouveau
blacklist lbm-nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
alias nouveau off
alias lbm-nouveau off

save and exit.

  1. Disable the Kernel nouveau by typing the following commands(nouveau-kms.conf may not exist,it is ok): 
    rahul@wind:~$ echo options nouveau modeset=0 | sudo tee -a /etc/modprobe.d/nouveau-kms.conf
options nouveau modeset=0
  2. build the new kernel by: 
    rahul@wind:~$ sudo update-initramfs -u
update-initramfs: Generating /boot/initrd.img-4.15.0-23-generic
  3. reboot
Run the Installer in run-level 3
$ sudo init 3 
$ sudo bash
$ ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-390.67.run

Uninstall

More instruction on how to stop using the driver before uninstallation
sudo nvidia-installer –uninstall

C. NVIDIA X Server Settings

Install this from the ubuntu software center.
Screenshot from 2018-07-12 17-23-43.png

D. Start the CUDA related setup

We will need the CUDA toolkit 9.1 which is supported for the GTX 970 version with compute 3.0 capability. So download the local installer for Ubuntu.

Screenshot from 2018-07-13 13-55-24.png

Downloaded the “cuda_9.1.85_387.26_linux.run*” local installation file.

$ sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
$ sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit gcc-6

Steps are taken from the CUDA 9.1 official documentation

  1. Perform the pre-installation actions.
  2.  Disable the Nouveau drivers. We did this in the above driver installation
  3. Reboot into text mode (runlevel 3). This can usually be accomplished by adding the number “3” to the end of the system’s kernel boot parameters. Change the runlevel ‘sudo init 3’, refer
  4. Verify that the Nouveau drivers are not loaded. If the Nouveau drivers are still loaded, consult your distribution’s documentation to see if further steps are needed to disable Nouveau.
  5. Run the installer and follow the on-screen prompts:
$ chmod +x cuda_9.1.85_387.26_linux
$ rahul@wind:~/Downloads$ ./cuda_9.1.85_387.26_linux --override

Screenshot from 2018-07-13 13-52-19.png

Since we already installed the Driver above we say NO in the NVIDIA accelerated graphic driver installation question.

Screenshot from 2018-07-13 13-54-20.png

This will install the CUDA stuff in the following locations

  • CUDA Toolkit /usr/local/cuda-9.1
  • CUDA Samples $(HOME)/NVIDIA_CUDA-9.1_Samples

We can verify the graphic card using the NVIDIA-SMI command.

Screenshot from 2018-07-12 20-02-08

Uninstallation

cd /usr/local/cuda-9.1/bin
sudo ./uninstall_cuda_9.1.pl

 

E. Environment Variables

rahul@wind:~$ vim ~/.bashrc

# Add the following to the environment variables
export PATH=/usr/local/cuda-9.1/bin${PATH:+:${PATH}}
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/local/cuda-9.1/lib64 
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=${LD_LIBRARY_PATH}:/usr/local/cuda-9.1/lib

rahul@wind:~$ source ~/.bashrc
rahul@wind:~$ nvcc --version
nvcc: NVIDIA (R) Cuda compiler driver
Copyright (c) 2005-2018 NVIDIA Corporation
Built on Tue_Jun_12_23:07:04_CDT_2018
Cuda compilation tools, release 9.1,

 

F. Test

Ensure you have the right driver versions

rahul@wind:$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
NVRM version: NVIDIA UNIX x86_64 Kernel Module 390.67 Fri Jun 1 04:04:27 PDT 2018
GCC version: gcc version 7.3.0 (Ubuntu 7.3.0-16ubuntu3)

Change directory to the NVIDIA CUDA Samples and compile them

rahul@wind:~/NVIDIA_CUDA-9.1_Samples$ make

Now run the device query test

rahul@wind:~/NVIDIA_CUDA-9.1_Samples/bin/x86_64/linux/release$ ./deviceQuery
./deviceQuery Starting...

CUDA Device Query (Runtime API) version (CUDART static linking)

 

END