Work arounds to make CUDA 11.2.2 work on FreeBSD?

I was tasked with seeing the viability of FreeBSD 12.2-RELEASE as a workspace as we need to shift away from CentOS. FreeBSD obviously does not have official support for CUDA drivers, however I was told it “could” make use of CentOS emulation which I was asked to try. If it is completely impossible to accomplish this, please let me know and disregard the rest of this post.

I first installed gcc and the basic nvidia display drivers. I then used freebsd ports to install emulators/linux_base-c7 and textproc/linux-c7-libxml2 for Centos7 emulation .

Once this setup was complete I fetched the latest CentOS 7 local installer for CUDA (11.2.2). As root I ran the installer and, using the default options in the commandline user interface, chose to install. This left me with a driver installation failure error which I found in /var/nvidia-installer.log stating I needed modprobe which could be obtained via kmod or module-init-tools. I attempted to resolve this by installing the drm-kmod FreeBSD package, but with no success.

From there I have reached a bit of a sticking point. If this isn’t a completely hopeless endeavor I would appreciate advice.

1 Like

It’s a shame that no one replied. This is a very good question.

Do you actually need the installer? In the end, the installer shouldn’t to more than any (linux) package installer. And these only dump files onto your filesystem.

I remember seeing a thread somewhere, though, where they still had some runtime problems with some cuda libraries. But maybe that can be solved with CentOS emulation?