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Installing the NVIDIA driver, CUDA and cuDNN on Linux

Installing the NVIDIA driver, CUDA and cuDNN on Linux (Ubuntu 20.04)

This is a companion piece to my instructions on building TensorFlow from source. In particular, the aim is to install the following pieces of software

on an Ubuntu Linux system, in particular Ubuntu 20.04.

At the time of writing (2020-08-06), these were the latest available versions. As a disclaimer, please note that I am not interested in running an outdated Ubuntu version or installing a CUDA/cuDNN version that is not the latest. Therefore, the below instructions may or may not be useful to you. Please also note that the instructions are likely outdated, since I only update them occasionally. Don't just copy these instructions, but check what the respective latest versions are and use these instead!

Installing the NVIDIA driver

Download and install the latest NVIDIA graphics driver from here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/. Note that every CUDA version requires a minimum version of the driver; check this beforehand.

Ubuntu 20.04 currently offers installation of the NVIDIA driver version 440.100 through its built-in 'Additional Drivers' mechanism, which should be sufficient for CUDA 10.2. CUDA 11.0 appears to require a newer version of the NVIDIA driver, so we're going to install this manually.

Download and install the latest NVIDIA graphics driver from here: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/.

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-450.57.run

The CUDA runfile also includes a version of the NVIDIA graphics driver, but I like to separate installing either, as the version supplied with CUDA Is not necessarily the latest version of the driver.

Installing CUDA

Download the latest CUDA version here. For example, I downloaded:

$ wget http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/11.0.2/local_installers/cuda_11.0.2_450.51.05_linux.run

Thankfully, CUDA 11 currently supports the up-to-date Ubuntu version, 20.04, so we don't need to jump through hoops to deal with an unsupported GNU version error as in previous versions of this document. Simply install as per the official instructions:

$ sudo sh cuda_11.0.2_450.51.05_linux.run

You may need to confirm that the display driver is already installed, and de-select installation of the display driver.

Once finished, you should see a summary like this:

===========
= Summary =
===========

Driver:   Not Selected
Toolkit:  Installed in /usr/local/cuda-11.0/
Samples:  Installed in /home/michael/, but missing recommended libraries

Please make sure that
 -   PATH includes /usr/local/cuda-11.0/bin
 -   LD_LIBRARY_PATH includes /usr/local/cuda-11.0/lib64, or, add /usr/local/cuda-11.0/lib64 to /etc/ld.so.conf and run ldconfig as root

To uninstall the CUDA Toolkit, run cuda-uninstaller in /usr/local/cuda-11.0/bin

Please see CUDA_Installation_Guide_Linux.pdf in /usr/local/cuda-11.0/doc/pdf for detailed information on setting up CUDA.
***WARNING: Incomplete installation! This installation did not install the CUDA Driver. A driver of version at least .00 is required for CUDA 11.0 functionality to work.
To install the driver using this installer, run the following command, replacing <CudaInstaller> with the name of this run file:
    sudo <CudaInstaller>.run --silent --driver

Do what the instructions given in the summary say and add the given directories to your PATH and LD_LIBRARY_PATH. For example by adding the following lines to your .bashrc, .zshrc, or whatever shell you are using:

export PATH=/usr/local/cuda-11.0/bin:$PATH
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/cuda-11.0/lib64:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Installing cuDNN

Just go here and follow the instructions. You'll have to log in, so downloading of the right cuDNN binary packages cannot be easily automated. Meh.

Once downloaded, un-tar the file and copy the contents to their respective locations:

$ tar -xzvf cudnn-11.0-linux-x64-v8.0.2.39.tgz

$ sudo cp cuda/include/cudnn*.h /usr/local/cuda/include
$ sudo cp cuda/lib64/libcudnn* /usr/local/cuda/lib64
$ sudo chmod a+r /usr/local/cuda/include/cudnn*.h /usr/local/cuda/lib64/libcudnn*
@gourav2001k
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Tip: adding -av flag while copying the cudnn libs solves the problem of symlinks. The exacts commands would be

$ sudo cp -av cuda/include/cudnn*.h /usr/local/cuda/include
$ sudo cp -av cuda/lib64/libcudnn* /usr/local/cuda/lib64
$ sudo chmod a+r /usr/local/cuda/include/cudnn*.h /usr/local/cuda/lib64/libcudnn*

@MeAmarP
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MeAmarP commented Feb 17, 2022

Thanks

@russelljjarvis
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POP

I run PopOS, I downloaded and installed the CUDA version of PopOS onto a Dell. I find that in practice the Cuda driver isn't compatible with the gcc compiler, repeating the Cuda install instructions doesn't help with this either.

I am exploring ways to install Cuda besides the popOs supported ways.

@ggtux
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ggtux commented Nov 1, 2023

Hi, is there any newer installation guid for Ubuntu 22?

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