CUDA is not active unless I run it with sudo privillages ?

I have the problem of the original poster. No CUDA examples work (giving the original poster error message) until at least one of them is run with sudo. Only then they will work also without sudo.

nvcc -V
nvcc: NVIDIA (R) Cuda compiler driver
Copyright (c) 2005-2017 NVIDIA Corporation
Built on Fri_Nov__3_21:07:56_CDT_2017
Cuda compilation tools, release 9.1, V9.1.85
nvidia-smi
Sat Jan 13 17:17:45 2018       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 390.12                 Driver Version: 390.12                    |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 1050    Off  | 00000000:01:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| N/A   45C    P8    N/A /  N/A |    438MiB /  4042MiB |      7%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1175      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           251MiB |
|    0      2191      G   compiz                                       105MiB |
|    0     22048      G   ...-token=66A499926B7F83A4D6350846F6AAE0DB    80MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

I have installed CUDA with the runfile.

The linked solution was “fairly well-tested on RHEL/CentOS systems, but probably works on other distros with no or minor modifications”. But I have Ubuntu 16.04 LTS. Should I adopt that solution nevertheless to avoid having to start the first CUDA example as sudo?


I don’t know if this is related to this problem or not. If not, please tell me and I will open another thread.

The installation guide wants me to run

/usr/bin/nvidia-persistenced --verbose

at root, but I don’t have such program

whereis nvidia-persistenced 
nvidia-persistenced:

What should I do?