Installing NVIDIA driver on ubuntu server with container support

In this post will explore the install of docker and nvidia driver on ubuntu server with supported ubuntu versions 20, 22, 24.

Let's explore, how to install the docker with readymade commands, just need to run once.

Let's start with updating the Ubuntu repos:

​sudo apt update​

This will update the system repositories. 

Next is to follow these commands:

​sudo apt install -y docker.io ​

​sudo usermod -aG docker $USER​

​sudo systemctl enable docker​

​sudo systemctl start docker​

It will install the docker. Once completed let's move to next step. And also install the docker-composer if needed as:

sudo curl -L "https://github.com/docker/compose/releases/download/1.29.2/docker-compose-$(uname -s)-$(uname -m)" -o /usr/local/bin/docker-compose​

​sudo chmod +x /usr/local/bin/docker-compose​

Check docker-composer version: docker-compose version

After finishing the docker and composer install, let's move to the next step. For the NVIDIA driver install and the container support of GPU.

Step 1.

Get the recommended driver support for the ubuntu. To do so, we need to first install an ubuntu package to query the NVIDIA driver support. 

​sudo apt install ubuntu-drivers-common​

After install of sudo apt install ubuntu-drivers-common​, you can query for recommended drivers as, 

​ubuntu-drivers devices​ This will show the list of available drives with system recommendation. 

Step 2

We identified the driver, which is suitable for the system, now we will make the install with the below command:

​sudo apt install -y nvidia-driver-535​, you can use your own identified drives nvidia-driver-xxx

After installing the NVIDIA driver, system need a reboot, so do it as sudo reboot​

After reboot, check the installed driver by nvidia-smi​

It will give output like:

Once you re-login to VM or system, it's time to install the container support for GPU. Let's see.

# Add NVIDIA's official package repositories
distribution=$(. /etc/os-release; echo $ID$VERSION_ID)
curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/gpgkey | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg
curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/$distribution/nvidia-container-toolkit.list \
  | sed 's#deb #deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg] #' \
  | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-container-toolkit.list

sudo apt update
sudo apt install -y nvidia-container-toolkit

    

The above commands will help you installing the nvidia-container-toolkit.

The above commands has three commands, 

1. Add repo

2. Do update

3. Install package.

Step 3

Restart the docker after install of nvidia-container-toolkit​

sudo systemctl restart docker

Now try to run a simple GPU based docker image.

​docker run --rm --gpus all nvidia/cuda:12.2.0-base-ubuntu20.04 nvidia-smi​

It will give output like:

You are all set with your environment now.

Hope you find it helpful!

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