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For advanced user who wants to get the latest version of the driver, get rid of the reinstallation issue caused bby dkms, or using Linux distributions that do not have nvidia drivers provided in the repositories, installing from runfile is recommended.
The latest NVIDIA driver for Linux OS can be fetched from NVIDIA's official website. The first one in the list, i.e. Latest Long Lived Branch version for Linux x86_64/AMD64/EM64T, is suitable for most case.
If you want to down load the driver directly in a Linux shell, the script below would be useful.
cd ~
wget http://us.download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86_64/384.69/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-384.69.run
Detailed installation instruction can be found in the download page via a README hyperlink in the ADDITIONAL INFORMATION tab. I have also summarized key steps below.
Software required for the runfile are officially listed here. But this page seems to be stale and not easy to follow.
For Ubuntu, installing the following dependencies is enough.
build-essential-- For building the driver- (Optional)
gcc-multilib-- For providing 32-bit support dkms-- For providing dkms support- (Optional)
xorgandxorg-dev. On a workstation with GUI, this is require but usually have already been installed, because you have already got the graphic display. On headless servers without GUI, this is not a must.
As a summary, excuting sudo apt-get install build-essential dkms xorg xorg-dev to install all dependencies.
Create a file at /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nouveau.conf with the following contents:
blacklist nouveau
options nouveau modeset=0
Note: It is also possible for the NVIDIA installation runfile to creat this blacklist file automatically. Excute the runfile and follow instructions when an error realted Nouveau appears.
Then for Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, excute sudo update-initramfs -u and reboot the computer;
After the computer is rebooted. We need to stop the desktop manager before excuting the runfile to install the driver. lightdm is the default desktop manager in Ubuntu. If GNOME or KDE desktop environment is used, installed desktop manager will then be gdm or kdm.
- For Ubuntu 14.04 / 16.04, excuting
sudo service lightdm stop(or usegdmorkdminstead oflightdm) - For Ubuntu 16.04 / Fedora / CentOS, excuting
sudo systemctl stop lightdm(or usegdmorkdminstead oflightdm)
After above batch of preparition, we can eventually start excuting the runfile. So this is why I, from the very begining, recommend new users to install the driver via apt-get.
cd ~
chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-384.69.run
sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-384.69.run --dkms -s
Note:
- option
--dkmsis used for register dkms module into the kernel so that update of the kernel will not require a reinstallation of the driver. This option should be turned on by default. - option
-sis used for silent installation which should used for batch installation. For installation on a single computer, this option should be turned off for more installtion information. - option
--no-opengl-filescan also be added if non-NVIDIA (AMD or Intel) graphics are used for display while NVIDIA graphics are used for display. - The installer may prompt warning on a system without X.Org installed. It is safe to ignore that based on my experience.
WARNING: nvidia-installer was forced to guess the X library path '/usr/lib' and X module path '/usr/lib/xorg/modules'; these paths were not queryable from the system. If X fails to find the NVIDIA X driver module, please install the `pkg-config` utility and the X.Org SDK/development package for your distribution and reinstall the driver.
After a succesful installation, nvidia-smi command will report all your CUDA-capable devices in the system.
Installing CUDA from runfile is much simpler and smoother than installing the NVIDIA driver. It just involves copying files to system directories and has nothing to do with the system kernel or online compilation. Removing CUDA is simply removing the installation directory. So I personally does not recommend adding NVIDIA's repositories and install CUDA via apt-get or other package managers as it will not reduce the complexity of installation or uninstallation but increase the risk of messing up the configurations for repositories.
The CUDA runfile installer can be downloaded from NVIDIA's websie. But what you download is a package the following three components:
- an NVIDIA driver installer, but usually of stale version;
- the actual CUDA installer;
- the CUDA samples installer;
To extract above three components, one can execute the runfile installer with --extract option. Then, executing the second one will finish the CUDA installation. Installation of the samples are also recommended because useful tool such as deviceQuery and p2pBandwidthLatencyTest are provided.
Scripts for installing CUDA Toolkit are summarized below.
cd ~
wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/7.5/Prod/local_installers/cuda_7.5.18_linux.run
chmod +x cuda_7.5.18_linux.run
./cuda_7.5.18_linux.run --extract=$HOME
sudo ./cuda-linux64-rel-7.5.18-19867135.run
After the installation finishes, configure runtime library.
sudo bash -c "echo /usr/local/cuda/lib64/ > /etc/ld.so.conf.d/cuda.conf"
sudo ldconfig
It is also recommended for Ubuntu users to append string /usr/local/cuda/bin to system file /etc/environments so that nvcc will be included in $PATH. This will take effect after reboot.
The recommended way for installing cuDNN is to first copy the tgz file to /usr/local and then extract it, and then remove the tgz file if necessary. This method will preserve symbolic links.
At last, execute sudo ldconfig to update the shared library cache.
This is why I love gists! Thanks man