TLDR: issue with Isaac Sim start-up was due more to the Secure Boot BIOS flag than the Nvidia driver version.
Thanks for the advice on the driver version: stable is better for me!
I started with a fresh Ubuntu installation and followed just the process in the Isaac Sim installation process (i.e. without the Nucleus server) and using Nvidia driver version 550.144.03.
https://docs.isaacsim.omniverse.nvidia.com/latest/installation/install_container.html
- Changing the driver version to 550.144.03 didn’t immediately help: Isaac Sim container startup still failed.
- The issue turned out to be Secure Boot not allowing the Nvidia drivers to work correctly.
This was surprising because I had followed the process from the forum post below to get the Nvidia driver signed and so allowed under Secure Boot. I was fooled by the successful running ofnvidia-smiand the Nucleus server container, thinking that indicated the Nvidia driver was successfully loaded on boot, but that was apparently naive… :)
Secure Boot on Linux post: NVIDIA drivers not working while Secure Boot is enabled after updating to Ubuntu 24.04 - #2 by mohammad.vazirpanah1
- With Secure Boot enabled in the BIOS, with driver 550.144.03, the
docker runcommand to start the Isaac Sim container produced the same error as before:nvidia-container-cli: mount error: stat failed: /dev/nvidia-modeset: no such file or directory: unknown. - With Secure Boot disabled in the BIOS, the
docker runcommand for Isaac Sim started up the image correctly, and I was able to./runheadlessand connect to the Isaac Sim image with the Isaac Sim WebRTC Streaming client. Through that I was able to try the first Isaac Sim Quickstart trials. The HUD in Isaac Sim confirmed the GPU was available and being used.
Thanks for your help with this troubleshooting!