blog:2018:1228_upgrading_nvidia_drivers [NervTech's Wiki]

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====== Upgrading Nvidia Drivers on Ubuntu ======

{{tag>admin linux}}

While trying to get back on Deep Learning experiments, I faced the need to upgrade my nvidia drivers on my ubuntu 14.04 LTS system.

So I thought it would be a good idea to write this down here to keep track of how to do it once and for all.

====== ======

The first thing to do is to check what is the version of the drivers currently installed: <code>nvidia-smi</code>

=> In my case I had **Driver Version: 390.87**

Then we check what is the latest version available from that PPA: https://launchpad.net/~graphics-drivers/+archive/ubuntu/ppa

=> Latest package version is: **nvidia-410** to install drivers version 410.79

From there, we remove the previously installed drivers: <code>sudo apt-get purge nvidia*</code>

Then we add the PPA **if needed**: <code>sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers</code>

And we update our apt sources: <code>sudo apt-get update</code>

And finally we install the new drivers we want: <code>sudo apt-get install nvidia-410</code>

Then you would normally reboot your computer to get the new drivers loaded, but I usually try to avoid this process (ie. reboot my server), so a working alternative at this point seems to be to manually force reloading the drivers with the following commands: <code>sudo rmmod nvidia_drm
sudo rmmod nvidia_modeset
sudo rmmod nvidia_uvm
sudo rmmod nvidia
sudo nvidia-smi</code>

<note>The last command above is the one that will force loading the new drivers, and the **rmmod** commands will remove the kernel modules from the previous version.</note>

<note important>If you get additional messages such as: "rmmod: ERROR: Module nvidia is in use by: nvidia_modeset nvidia_uvm" this simply means you have other modules you should unload before the one you are currently trying to remove</note>

Then you should have your new drivers version in use as shown below: <code>kenshin@neptune:~$ nvidia-smi
Fri Dec 28 18:32:20 2018
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 410.79       Driver Version: 410.79       CUDA Version: 10.0     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 107...  Off  | 00000000:06:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   51C    P0    36W / 180W |      0MiB /  8119MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
|   1  GeForce GTX 107...  Off  | 00000000:07:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
|  0%   52C    P0    33W / 180W |      0MiB /  8117MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
</code>