NVIDIA drivers and Vulkan compatibility

[matteo.ungaro]

Hi there,

I’m having some problems to get Vulkan to work. Specifically, after running the gfaestus tool I’m prompted with the following message:

DEBUG [gfaestus] using ../pangenome/pangenome_ref_guided_pggb.gfa and ../pangenome/pangenome_ref_guided_pggb.og.lay.tsv
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan] Initializing GfaestusVk context
WARN [gfaestus::vulkan::init] enumerating instance extension properties
WARN [gfaestus::vulkan::init] "VK_EXT_debug_report"
WARN [gfaestus::vulkan::init] "VK_EXT_debug_utils"
WARN [gfaestus::vulkan::init] "VK_KHR_portability_enumeration"
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan] Using X11 event loop
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan] Creating window
INFO [winit::platform_impl::platform::x11::window] Guessed window scale factor: 2
DEBUG [winit::platform_impl::platform::x11::window] Calculated physical dimensions: 800x600
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan] Created Vulkan entry
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan::init] Creating instance
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan::init] Enumerated required instance extensions
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan::init] getting layer names and pointers
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan::init] Loading instance extension "VK_KHR_surface"
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan::init] Loading instance extension "VK_KHR_xlib_surface"
DEBUG [gfaestus::vulkan::init] Loading instance extension "VK_KHR_get_physical_device_properties2"
ERROR [gfaestus] Error initializing Gfaestus
ERROR [gfaestus] VkError(ERROR_INCOMPATIBLE_DRIVER)

I talked with the guy who made this tool, he said it is a problem related to Vulkan drivers which seem cannot be recognised by gfaestus. Now, this is the output of my nvidia-smi command:

and, as you can see, I have the 510.73.05 driver installed.

My first question would be, is this driver the one the person working on gfaestus referred to? If so, I’m aware the latest release for NVIDIA drivers for Linux is the 515.48.07, which also appears to be compatible with Vulkan, and I’m more than happy to install it.

However, few months ago I went through a lot of troubles just to get another tool, making use of GPU acceleration, to work. So, how can I do I clean install just for these drivers; in other words, there is an easy way to remove 510 and replace it with 515 without messing things up? Unfortunately, the option is not displayed on the Software & Updates application in Ubuntu 22.04 (see below)

Sorry for the long text, and thanks in advance!

[matteo.ungaro]

Hi anyone has any advice on this? Thanks again.

[generix]

To get the latest drivers, please add the graphics drivers ppa, then it should show up:
https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

[matteo.ungaro]

Hi @generix,

Thanks a lot! I’ve done what you said and the new driver shows up in Software & Updates. I then proceeded to install it and I got an error, so I had to purge the NVIDIA drivers and install back the 510 one.

I must say I only updated the driver alone without updating CUDA as well, which is still at version 11.6. Is this the cause of incompatibility between the two? In other words, I’m also forced to update CUDA to the newest 11.7 version?

This seems strage to me, but maybe you can clarify. Thanks again!

[generix]

Cuda doesn’t need to be upgraded, it only needs a minimum driver version and then stays compatible.