4.10 kernel (Ubuntu 16.04/17.04) support

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Setup and Installation
1

Hi,

The latest Ubuntu press release says “The 4.10 kernel will also become the LTS Rolling Kernel in 16.04 LTS”.
I see the work is being done on the 381.09 beta driver to work with the 4.10 kernel.

Do you know know if the CUDA Toolkit is going to be compatible with 16.04 LTS with this new kernel?
Also, should it in principle work in Ubuntu 17.04 with said kernel, even if not officially supported?
Any instructions for installing the toolkit on non-officially supported distributions?

I’m really stuck here as to how to proceed with the toolkit installation, given that 4.10 kernel is pretty much required for proper Ryzen CPU support, which I have. Would appreciate any help.

2

Patch exists for kernel 4.10 already on older drivers:
[url]https://pastebin.com/giS541m0[/url]

For bleeding new hardware, these type of patches are expected under Linux until proper adoption is done for proprietary drivers catching up to new kernel versions.

I believe that specific beta driver version you mentioned already supports kernel 4.10… try it out:

I have not seen any instance of any of the CUDA toolkit binaries caring or having issues about kernel versions, so I do not foresee problems with that. Usually no issues with using a newer (unsupported) version of Ubuntu. You might need to downgrade gcc/g++ as appropriate if it is too new for CUDA toolkit to support.

So basically… install your bleeding edge kernel, look for patches (if necessary) for your bleeding edge nvidia driver, patch if required, then install CUDA Toolkit.

3

Thank you so much for your reply! (Just managed to get a break from work to actually try it out).

I seems to have worked. This is what I did:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt update
sudo apt install nvidia-381
sudo apt install nvidia-cuda-toolkit  # note: "sudo apt install cuda" did not work with: "Some packages could not be installed."

sudo reboot

# test driver version
nvidia-smi
# test cuda version
nvcc --version
4

Hmm, looks like installing one of these installed gnome/unity which I don’t want on this server machine. The system now boots to the graphical login screen, and I can’t even log into it using the same username/password, so I booted into the recovery mode, enabled networking, and did:

sudo apt purge gnome*
sudo apt purge unity*
sudo apt autoremove