Nvidia Nsight System 2020.2.3. Launch Error

Robotics & Edge Computing Jetson Systems Jetson Xavier NX
1

Hi, all

I am in trouble with launching NVIDIA Nsight System 2020.2.3.

When I launch Nvidia Nsight systems 2020.2.3,

I got this error message.

Seems random generation is broken on your system. Possibly, you need to update your BIOS and/or kernel. The application will now exit.

As a workaround you can try to start the NVIDIA Nsight Systems with the QT_NO_CPU_FEATURE=rdrand environment variable.

Do you have any idea to solve this problem?

I could not figure out how to start NVIDIA Nsight systems with the

QT_NO_CPU_FEATURE=rdrand environment variable.

Any help will be very appreciated.

Thanks in advance.

Regards.

p.s. I installed NVIDIA Nsight system 2020.2.3 through JetPack4.4.

2

I can’t help with what is going on with Nsight, but something to test might help. What do you see from this on host PC side after the message shows up?
ls -l /dev/*random

Does the following have any output?
cat /dev/urandom | hexdump | head -n 2

If the files are missing, or if the output of urandom is missing, then I could see the PC needing something (and it would be unusual to not have these files present and working).

3

Thank you for the reply.

I tried what you said.

(base) yjkim@casys:/opt/nvidia/nsight-systems/2020.2.3/host-linux-x64$ ls -l /dev/*random
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 8  8월 20 13:15 /dev/random
crw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1, 9  8월 20 13:15 /dev/urandom
(base) yjkim@casys:/opt/nvidia/nsight-systems/2020.2.3/host-linux-x64$ cat /dev/urandom | hexdump | head n 2
head: cannot open 'n' for reading: No such file or directory
head: cannot open '2' for reading: No such file or directory

It seems there is something wrong with my PC…

I hope there is any way to solve this problem without re-installation Ubuntu.

Anyway, thank you very much!

Regards.

4

I had a typographic error in the command which failed…there was a hyphen (“-”) I missed. I corrected it in the original, and will paste it again here (note the “-n 2” instead of “n 2”):
cat /dev/urandom | hexdump | head -n 2

So far it looks like your PC is working as expected. You could run that command to verify random number generation.

I’m not sure why a BIOS change would even be referenced by most software. There are times when a virtualization is used, and must be enabled in BIOS, but that question can be asked once it is verified urandom has output.

5

Thanks for the reply!

I tried your command again.

(base) yjkim@casys:~$ cat /dev/urandom | hexdump | head -n 2
0000000 6499 08f9 1d2a d38c bc15 9bf2 da21 b98d
0000010 840b eb30 e879 859a b8fa f39a 68df be0d

It seems it could generate random numbers well.

I also re-installed Ubuntu 18.04 and tried to launch nsight-system again,

but it still shows the same error message.

Seems random generation is broken on your system. Possibly, you need to update your BIOS and/or kernel. The application will now exit.

As a workaround you can try to start the NVIDIA Nsight Systems with the QT_NO_CPU_FEATURE=rdrand environment variable.

Thanks in advance.

Regards.

6

This is certainly a very puzzling error. I have no doubt that something obscure/arcane is going on, and the only reason I can think of for the comment on the BIOS would be if some sort of virtualization were required.

This part leads me to think it is strictly a QT widget set issue:
with the QT_NO_CPU_FEATURE=rdrand environment variable
…which would mean the message is not descriptive of the real issue.

Are you starting nsight on command line strictly with either “nsight” or “sudo nsight” (sudo is required for some purposes, but not all)? If so, then try prefixing it as shown in one of these:
QT_NO_CPU_FEATURE=rdrand nsight
…or:
sudo QT_NO_CPU_FEATURE=rdrand nsight

Would someone from NVIDIA be able to track down why nsight might demand fixing the BIOS for lack of random number functions on a system which has properly working “/dev” files for random number generation? This is a very unusual error, and I can’t help but think knowing what the error really means is something other than what the message is printing.