A bit early for christmas presents, but I got myself a new machine (AMD Ryzen 3900X / 32G / RTX2060 Super, by the way Ryzen CPUs are real monsters). Now, let’s try to make use of this.

Nvidia drivers and tools

Assuming the Debian backports are configured, we can choose to use a more up to date driver version.

> cat /etc/apt/sources.list.d/backports.list
deb http://deb.debian.org/debian buster-backports main contrib non-free

Install the nvidia-driver (currently 450.80) and the nvidia-cuda-toolkit (currently 11.1)

cuDNN packages

Tensorflow require the cuDNN components but they are not available in the usual repository so we have to download the packages from Nvidia. cuDNN is not available for the Debian distribution but Ubuntu ones are compatible enough. The packages we need are :

• libcudnn8_8.0.5.39-1+cuda11.1_amd64.deb
• libcudnn8-dev_8.0.5.39-1+cuda11.1_amd64.deb

We’ll install them manually with a dpkg -i as configuring the Nvidia repository will probably fetch conflicting packages too.

Jupyter notebook

Most of the documentation on the internet related to machine learning is using the python API,

> python3 -mvenv jupyter-env
> cd jupyter-env
> . ./bin/activate
> pip install -U pip setuptools wheel
> pip install jupyterlab tensorflow-gpu

Then check if the GPU is available to Tensorflow :

> python3
>>> import tensorflow as tf
2020-12-26 11:19:12.763644: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcudart.so.11.0
>>> tf.config.list_physical_devices()
2020-12-26 11:19:50.377149: I tensorflow/compiler/jit/xla_cpu_device.cc:41] Not creating XLA devices, tf_xla_enable_xla_devices not set
2020-12-26 11:19:50.382895: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcuda.so.1
2020-12-26 11:19:50.471910: I tensorflow/stream_executor/cuda/cuda_gpu_executor.cc:941] successful NUMA node read from SysFS had negative value (-1), but there must be at least one NUMA node, so returning NUMA node zero
2020-12-26 11:19:50.472295: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1720] Found device 0 with properties:
pciBusID: 0000:0a:00.0 name: GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER computeCapability: 7.5
coreClock: 1.695GHz coreCount: 34 deviceMemorySize: 7.79GiB deviceMemoryBandwidth: 417.29GiB/s
2020-12-26 11:19:50.472310: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcudart.so.11.0
2020-12-26 11:19:50.485168: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcublas.so.11
2020-12-26 11:19:50.485199: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcublasLt.so.11
2020-12-26 11:19:50.491058: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcufft.so.10
2020-12-26 11:19:50.494631: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcurand.so.10
2020-12-26 11:19:50.494706: W tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:60] Could not load dynamic library 'libcusolver.so.10'; dlerror: libcusolver.so.10: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory
2020-12-26 11:19:50.498531: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcusparse.so.11
2020-12-26 11:19:50.498616: I tensorflow/stream_executor/platform/default/dso_loader.cc:49] Successfully opened dynamic library libcudnn.so.8
2020-12-26 11:19:50.498625: W tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1757] Cannot dlopen some GPU libraries. Please make sure the missing libraries mentioned above are installed properly if you would like to use GPU. Follow the guide at https://www.tensorflow.org/install/gpu for how to download and setup the required libraries for your platform.
Skipping registering GPU devices...
[PhysicalDevice(name='/physical_device:CPU:0', device_type='CPU')]
>>>

And, we failed ! cuDNN was loaded, GPU is detected but Tensorflow wants an older version of libcusolver: nvidia-cuda-toolkit installed the version 11 but we need the version 10 (no idea why as other libraries use cuda11, which is the correct version for tensorflow 2.4).

Not a big issue as a libcusolver10 package is available in the backports. Let’s install that then give it another try:

Update: Now, libcusolver11 is no longer available in the buster-backports and tensorflow-gpu keep requesting the v10, it will probably be fixed in next tensorflow or nvidia drivers release but in the meantime, it seems the workaround is to use the cuda11 library through a symlink:

cd /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu
ln -sf libcusolver.so.11 libcusolver.so.10
ldconfig


...
2020-12-26 11:21:28.182053: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1862] Adding visible gpu devices: 0
[PhysicalDevice(name='/physical_device:CPU:0', device_type='CPU'), PhysicalDevice(name='/physical_device:GPU:0', device_type='GPU')]
>>>

Now launch a notebook with jupyter lab, and run some tutorial code

...
2020-12-26 11:27:51.811618: I tensorflow/core/common_runtime/gpu/gpu_device.cc:1406] Created TensorFlow device (/job:localhost/replica:0/task:0/device:GPU:0 with 6736 MB memory) -> physical GPU (device: 0, name: GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER, pci bus id: 0000:0a:00.0, compute capability: 7.5)
...

Yep, seems good now.