12gb of RAM in use on a freshly-booted Spark?! Disabling desktop mode?

Accelerated Computing DGX Spark / GB10 User Forum DGX Spark / GB10
1

Just unboxed my Spark, did the headless setup over the network, waited for it to install all the updates and reboot itself. Everything went fine, but I’m looking at the DGX dashboard and…

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12gb of RAM in use for a freshly booted server seems like an awful lot, even on a box with 128gb of RAM. Looking at top, the main offenders seem to be desktop-related:

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I’m well aware of how to make an Ubuntu system boot into console-only mode (or “Headless Network Appliance” mode as Nvidia apparently calls it), but I want to confirm it’s safe to do so on the Spark, or if there’s an official way to do it.

2

Actually, I wonder if this is a dashboard bug. free shows a more reasonable RAM usage:

blanders@sparky:~$ free -g
               total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:             119           3         116           0           1         116
Swap:             15           0          15
3

Hi brian3, our engineers are aware of this issue and are working on a fix. The next update should provide a more accurate view of memory utilization.

4

The best way to stop using the desktop is to run the command:

systemctl stop gdm gnome-remote-desktop cups cups-browsed