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About

Rationale

This is a workaround for a fairly annoying bug in nVidia's Linux drivers. A long time ago, you could see all sorts of helpful information on your GeForce GPU simply by typing nvidia-smi - however, in recent drivers, the output is largely dominated by "N/A". This is because nVidia no longer supports the GeForce series GPUs in nvidia-smi.

The real bug, however, resides in the nVidia Management Library (NVML), which incorrectly reports that the GPU isn't supported. This repository provides a fix for that bug.

How it works

This workaround is a shim that sits between the program trying to use NVML (Ganglia plugin, pyNVML, nvidia-smi, ...) and the actual NVML library itself. Whenever a device handle is requested from NVML, the shim flips an internal "supported" flag before returning it to the hosted program. Therefore, when the handle is used in subsequent calls to the library, NVML correctly sees that the device is in fact supported, and returns information properly.

How to use

The makefile can be used to build shims for a given NVML version with make TARGET_VER=325.08 - currently supported versions are: 325.08, 319.32, 319.23 To install, delete the libnvidia-ml.so.1 symlink currently in your /usr/lib and run make install PREFIX=/usr. Currently valid versions are: 325.15, 325.08, 319.32 and 319.23.

If you are on a 64-bit system, you can build 32-bit versions with make CFLAGS=-m32.

Note: The nVidia drivers are not a dependency for building the shims.

Legal

Disclaimer

I am not to be held responsible if something breaks down on you. Use at your own risk.

Copyright

The nVidia driver license forbids distributing modified binary files. This repository contains no binary files from nVidia, and use of the shim makes no modifications to binary files either.

License

Gosh I dunno... Public domain, I guess. :)