Nvidia-driver for gtx 1070 [solved]

[larry77]

Dear All,
Apologies for the long post. Right now on my box (debian stable) I use a rather seasoned graphic card.

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$ lspci | grep -i --color 'vga\|3d\|2d'
05:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation GF108 [GeForce GT 630] (rev a1)

I do not use it for gaming or gpu computing. I have nothing from nvidia installed and no issues whatsoever with nouveau.
However, I cannot use this card for GPU computing. Soon (hopefully tomorrow given when I write this) I will get a gtx 1070 with 8Gb of memory which will be enough at least to get me started. Leaving aside the issues of using 2 cards on my box, for now I just plan to replace the old card.
It appears that for a number of algorithms I need to install nvidia-driver, see for instance

https://catboost.ai/docs/installation/c ... aries.html

At the moment, these are the kernels installed on my system

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$ dpkg --list | grep linux-image | grep ii
ii  linux-image-4.19.0-9-amd64                4.19.118-2+deb10u1                           amd64        Linux 4.19 for 64-bit PCs (signed)
ii  linux-image-5.7.0-6.4-liquorix-amd64      5.7-6.1~buster                               amd64        Linux 5.7 for 64-bit PCs
ii  linux-image-liquorix-amd64                5.7-6.1~buster                               amd64        Linux image for liquorix on 64-bit PCs

I need several words of wisdom. I am number person, but not a software engineer. My goal is to get the bare minimum installed so that in some code I can set up a flag for GPU and forget about it.
In the past, I had no end of trouble with nvidia and company, in particular when installing a new kernel.
The dream would be to install the nvidia stuff that I need and then whenever a new kernel is available, having everything automagically setup for the new kernel.
The nightmare is not to be able to raise any graphical desktop on my system.
I suppose the reality is in the middle. If there no support in debian for nvidia-driver for kernels 5.7.x, but I can get it to work with the 4.19 kernel, well, I can live with that. I still would like my system to be bootable an usable regardless of the kernel I load (if then I need 4.19 for GPU computing, I will accept that).

Finally, in case it helps, I add this link

http://rglinuxtech.com/?p=2761

and I should say I have zero experience in installing drivers directly provided from nvidia.

Any suggestion is appreciated!

[stevepusser]

The GTX 1070 is supported by the standard non-free 418.113 driver in the non-free section of the Debian repos.

Install and run nvidia-detect first to confirm that, then install per the wiki: https://wiki.debian.org/NvidiaGraphicsDrivers

For CUDA, follow the wiki instructions.

[larry77]

Thanks.
I got this far, but I understood you wrote in another post that nvidia-driver is not really compatible with kernel 5.7.x.
Or have I misunderstood?

[stevepusser]

Yes, you'll have to wait for a 5.7-compatible driver to hit buster-backports. It's the upstream 440.82-2 revision that has the patch for 5.7, and that's not in buster-backports,,,though I already did it for MX Linux, the backport is rather simple. There are also some other drivers that aren't in backports yet, either. i had to import a patch from Arch Linux and add it to the bbswitch build to get my Optimus laptops to keep working with Bumblebee on the new kernel.

https://packages.debian.org/bullseye/nvidia-driver

So, you should be OK up to kernel 5.6 with the present drivers in backports.

[larry77]

Thanks a lot!
I followed your advice also recently and I managed a combination of backported kernel 5.8+nvidia driver + cuda which actually works (I had horrific experiences with the nvidia drivers/kernel).

[stevepusser]

Just a note that the only the Nvidia driver in Experimental is supposed to support CUDA on 5.9 kernels at present--but only experimentally.

[larry77]

Thanks. No need to go beyond 5.8 for me for now .