Mac Users should try 2.3

There is a 2.3 release which seems to be much better in all respects. I do not know why it has not appeared in this area yet but the thread

[url=“The Official NVIDIA Forums | NVIDIA”]The Official NVIDIA Forums | NVIDIA

contains 2.3 kext, toolkit and SDK, together with very clear info on which bits to use whether you have 285/4800 or something else. It also seems to compile a lot faster and subjectively I though performance was very slightly better. It does seem to banish many of the problems Mac people might have installing and getting going.

There is still the power management issue (e.g. deviceQuery shows a 285 shader at 0.6GHz, but this might depend on Apple revisions - I am using 10.5.7 - has anybody tried 10.5.8 ?).

No doubt I will be cursed by somebody finding something that no longer works, but so far it is uniformly better, even before you go to detailed enhancements.

I think there might be some issues with 2.3 in laptops, something regarding drivers. For me, at least, running an “old” mac book pro with a 8600 M GT, won’t compile more than a few parts of the SDK, and deviceQuery, which is indeed compiled won’t find the device. Also, no new drivers in beta state for mac, or at least not yesterday. I had to go back to 2.2 to continue my project.

I will try 2.3 tonight on my MBP 2.4/8600M GT, maybe doing a reinstall of Mac OS X (I have a big hard drive ;-) )

CUDA 2.3 is working swimmingly here on my old macboock pro w/ 8600M GT. I had to install the 2.3.0 drivers twice to get them to take, but after that everything works fine.

I’ve just tried installing 2.3, but I can no longer compile any CUDA programs. For example, when I try to make the SDK examples, it fails with the error

ld: library not found for -lcuda

Sure enough, there is no longer such a library as libcuda.dylib:

ls /usr/local/cuda/lib/
libcublas.dylib libcudart.dylib libcufftemu.dylib
libcublasemu.dylib libcufft.dylib libtlshook.dylib

Any idea what’s going on? That library existed in previous versions!

Peter

uh, reinstall? that is super-weird…

No good. I did the following.

  1. Reinstalled CUDA 2.2 and rebooted.

  2. Verified that libcuda.dylib was now where it should be, and that I could run CUDA programs.

  3. Downloaded a fresh copy of the 2.3 installer and ran it.

  4. Verified that libcuda.dylib had disappeared.

  5. Just to be absolutely sure, ran

lsbom /Library/Receipts/boms/com.nvidia.cuda.toolkit.pkg.bom | grep libcuda.dylib

That confirms that no such file was contained in the installer package.

Peter

libcuda.dylib is now part of the driver pkg.

Thanks. I reinstalled the driver package, and now I’ve got it. Perhaps there’s a bug in the Toolkit installer, such that if you install the driver first, the toolkit installer then deletes it?

Peter

Very odd. I was perhaps a bit optimistic in my initial post. I had previously had a 2.2 install for a 285 on a Pro, and previously the 2.2 install had been a bit of a pig, having to get part of the install from the forum sticky and other bits from elsewhere. With 2.3 I downloaded the advised parts and installed in the order: driver, toolkit, SDK, and it all worked like a dream first time under 10.5.7. Hence my cheery post.

Have the Macbook users having trouble checked that they have indeed picked the correct driver according to the instructions, as it seems to be critical to choose between the 285/Quadro kext and that for other GPUs.

Can the Nvidia folk comment on the 285 power management issue?

It very well could be. On my first install, I also put the driver in first and then the toolkit. After that, programs behaved as if there was no GPU (consistent with libcuda missing, I didn’t actually check for the file). After re-installing the driver, everything works.

I had the same thing here as well. I installed the driver package first, then the toolkit, then the sdk/examples, and I eventually discovered that libcuda.dylib was missing. I re-installed the driver package and libcuda is back.

Same thing here. It seems the order must be: toolkit first, then driver. Everything seems to be running fine now.

I just got an email from one of my coworkers who had exactly the same problem when installing 2.3: she ran all the installers, rebooted, and found it didn’t work. Then she re-ran the driver installer, and after that it did work. There’s clearly a bug in the 2.3 installer.

Peter

Hey guys.

I confirm the same behavior on macbook 5.1 with osx 10.6.

driver — toolkit — sdk ===> no libcuda.dlyb
After reinstallation of a driver libcuda comes back.

Must be a bug…

My suggestions to try 2.3 are now defunct given release of 2.3a, which behaves much better AND has OpenCL examples for SL. Go to tmurray’s helpful links and ignore this thread.