Installing the NVIDIA Drivers and CUDA 12.3 on Fedora 39 with Secure Boot Enabled
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Some time ago, I wrote some guidelines about how to install and configure the NVIDIA and CUDA drivers on Fedora 36 when the secure boot is enabled. This post revisits this installation process with a fresh-installed Fedora 39 workstation. It also explains how to get a dual monitor setup using NVIDIA Prime to display from both an NVIDIA Discrete GPU and an Intel integrated graphics, and how to get CUDA programs running.
1. Preparing the Public/Private Keys
The easiest way to install the NVIDIA drivers in Fedora Linux is via the RPM-Fusion packages. However, as far as I know, and based on my experience, there is no way to install it from the repositories when the secure boot is enabled. Thus, to install the NVIDIA driver, we need to perform a manual installation using the script provided by NVIDIA.
The website if-not-true-then-false provides a step-by-step guideline for manually installing the NVIDIA drivers on Fedora Linux for a wide set of versions (from Fedora 37 to Fedora 39 at the time of writing this post). However, when we perform the manual installation, we find the following error:
ERROR: Unable to load the `nvidia-drm` kernel module
This is due to the secure boot being enabled in the BIOS. However, if we must preserve the secure boot enabled from the BIOS, we need to sign the driver. Note that, if other OSs are installed, e.g., Windows, we may lose those installations when the secure boot is disabled. In order to install the NVIDIA driver and preserve the secure boot, we can follow the guidelines explained in this link. To sum up, we sign the driver using the following commands:
$ cd $home
$ mkdir -p bin/drivers
$ openssl req -new -x509 -newkey rsa:2048 -keyout /home/$USER/bin/drivers/Nvidia.key -outform DER -out /home/$USER/bin/drivers/Nvidia.der -nodes -days 100000 -subj "/CN=Graphics Drivers"
$ sudo mokutil --import /home/$USER/bin/drivers/Nvidia.der
As mentioned in link1 by itpropmn07:
“This command requires you create password for enrolling. Afterwards, reboot your computer, in the next boot, the system will ask you enroll, you enter your password (which you created in this step) to enroll it.”
Read more: https://sourceware.org/systemtap/wiki/SecureBoot”
2. Installing the NVIDIA Driver with the Signed Modules
The website if-not-true-then-false is an excellent resource installing the NVIDIA drivers for different Operating Systems. In a nutshell, we perform the following commands:
## Install dependencies
dnf install kernel-devel kernel-headers gcc make dkms acpid libglvnd-glx libglvnd-opengl libglvnd-devel pkgconfig
## blacklist nouveau
echo "blacklist nouveau" >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
## edit /etc/default/grub
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="rhgb quiet rd.driver.blacklist=nouveau nvidia-drm.modeset=1"
## Update grub2
grub2-mkconfig -o /boot/grub2/grub.cfg
## remove old package
dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nouveau
## Backup old initramfs nouveau image
mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
## Create new initramfs image ##
dracut /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)
systemctl set-default multi-user.target
After a reboot in multi-user.target mode (mode 3), we can install the NVIDIA driver:
$ sudo ./NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-535.146.02.run
--module-signing-secret-key=/home/$USER/bin/drivers/Nvidia.key
--module-signing-public-key=/home/$USER/bin/drivers/Nvidia.der
Once the installer script finishes, we reboot again with the graphical.target mode enabled.
$ systemctl set-default graphical.target
$ reboot
$ nvidia-smi
Sun Dec 10 15:49:57 2023
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.146.02 Driver Version: 535.146.02 CUDA Version: 12.2 |
|-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+======================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3070 Off | 00000000:01:00.0 On | N/A |
| 0% 41C P8 14W / 220W | 642MiB / 8192MiB | 28% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=======================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 2193 G /usr/libexec/Xorg 203MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 2418 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 187MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 3351 G /usr/bin/nautilus 9MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 3477 G /usr/lib64/firefox/firefox 135MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 4479 G ...sion,SpareRendererForSitePerProcess 92MiB |
+---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
3. Installing CUDA SDK
The NVIDIA website contains all the instructions for all supported operating systems. In the case of Fedora 39, we can apply the following commands:
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/12.3.1/local_installers/cuda-repo-fedora37-12-3-local-12.3.1_545.23.08-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo rpm -i cuda-repo-fedora37-12-3-local-12.3.1_545.23.08-1.x86_64.rpm
sudo dnf clean all
sudo dnf -y install cuda-toolkit-12-3
Note that we skipped the driver installation because it was manually installed in the first step.
4. Configuring Displays to render from iGPU and dGPU.
The installation and configuration process, that we have just followed, allows us to display and run commands using the NVIDIA GPU. But what if we have a dual monitor system, each displaying from a different GPU? One might ask, why do you need this? Well, for unknown reasons, Dell updated the BIOS and I can’t see the integrated GPU unless there is a cable and a screen connected to it. So, if I want both GPUs to run, let’s say, OpenCL, or oneAPI, I need at least one screen connected to the HDMI/DisplayPort of the Integrated GPU.
So, how can we achieve this? We need to enable NVIDIA Prime Synchronization. As stated in the NVIDIA Forums:
The goal of PRIME is to allow the NVIDIA GPU to share its output with the integrated GPU so that it can be presented to the display.
Following the official documentation, we apply the following changes to the /etc/X11/xorg.org:
Section "Module"
Load "modesetting"
EndSection
Section "Device"
Identifier "Device0"
Driver "nvidia"
VendorName "NVIDIA Corporation"
BusID "PCI:1:0:0"
Option "AllowEmptyInitialConfiguration"
EndSection
Then you can reboot. In my case, this enabled the two screens, and I could see both GPUs on my system (the RTX 3070 and the Intel HD Graphics).
5. Configuring GCC 12 for CUDA
Fedora 39 comes with GCC 13.2.1 by default. However, if you want to run CUDA, you might get the following error:
In file included from /usr/local/cuda/bin/../targets/x86_64-linux/include/cuda_runtime.h:82,
from <command-line>:
/usr/local/cuda/bin/../targets/x86_64-linux/include/crt/host_config.h:143:2: error: #error -- unsupported GNU version! gcc versions later than 12 are not supported! The nvcc flag '-allow-unsupported-compiler' can be used to override this version check; however, using an unsupported host compiler may cause compilation failure or incorrect run time execution. Use at your own risk.
143 | #error -- unsupported GNU version! gcc versions later than 12 are not supported! The nvcc flag '-allow-unsupported-compiler' can be used to override this version check; however, using an unsupported host compiler may cause compilation failure or incorrect run time execution. Use at your own risk.
Thus, we need to configure GCC 12. There are many package managers to do this. One of them is spack.
As suggested here:
## Install dependencies
$ sudo dnf install patch
And then:
$ git clone https://github.com/spack/spack.git
$ source spack/share/spack/setup-env.sh
$ spack install gcc@12.3.0
$ spack load gcc@12.3.0
Happy coding!