CUDA 10.0 and nvidia-418 driver on Ubuntu 14.04

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Setup and Installation
1

Hi,

I have a system with Ubuntu 14.04 (I know it’s very old, but it’s supposed to be still supported by both Ubuntu and Nvidia), a GeForce GTX 960 (connected to the screen) and a Titan Xp.

In an effort to update from CUDA 8.0 to 10.0 (version 10.0.130-1 in particular), I got a black screen at startup and then failure to recover lead to two re-installations of the system. As a result, I found that nvidia-418 driver (version 418.87.01 in particular) was causing the problem, with or without CUDA, on a number of Linux kernels including 3.13.0-170-generic (the current one), 3.13.0-169-generic and 3.13.0-32-generic (on a fresh Ubuntu 14.04 without anything else installed). This is not happening with nvidia-410 (the current one) or any previous driver I was using for the last few years. It is happening however on the same system with the Nouveau driver.

nvidia-418 driver is a dependency of CUDA 10.0. Switching back to nvidia-410 uninstalls CUDA 10.0, and I am not sure what is situation with earlier versions of CUDA. Although I have not tried to install, CUDA 10.1 should not be any different because it brings the same driver, version 418.87.01. I guess that sooner or later in some system update, I would have the same issue without CUDA at all. Questions:

  1. Is there a known issue or fix related to nvidia-418 driver on Ubuntu 14.04?
  2. Can it be an issue with the GeForce GTX 960?
  3. Is it possible to install CUDA 10.0 or later without updating to nvidia-418?

Thanks

2

Get the system running with the 410 driver.

Then install:

sudo apt-get install cuda-toolkit-10-0

3

Thank you for your response. With nvidia-410 driver installed, I tried cuda-toolkit-10-1 and indeed, it installs successfully without a driver. However, the updated driver is still needed at runtime. For instance, deviceQuery says

CUDA driver version is insufficient for CUDA runtime version
4

I was responding to your question 3:

“3. Is it possible to install CUDA 10.0 or later without updating to nvidia-418?”

You can install cuda-toolkit-10-0 as I indicated. It will work with the 410 driver.

I didn’t say CUDA 10.1 would work that way.

You can install cuda-toolkit-10-1 but it will require the 418 driver.

5

Thank you again. I tried cuda-toolkit-10-0 too, same result.

6

CUDA 10.0 will work with a R410 (410.xx) driver. Either your driver install is broken, or you are not using CUDA 10.0 when you run the test that produces the “driver version is insufficent…” error message.

7

Well, maybe something went wrong by installing and uninstalling too many things too many times. For instance, nvidia-smi was saying “CUDA version: N/A”. I will try gain.