How to set up Nvidia GPGPU computing using just the official Debian 11 repos

If you don’t know if or how your Nvidia GPU is supported by Debian, try running nvidia-detect from the nvidia-detect package.

For supported chips, setting up Nvidia GPGPU computing is as simple as installing the nvidia-opencl-icd package (from the non-free component). This will pull in a large swathe of recommended packages like the non-free, proprietary Nvidia graphics driver, libcuda1, nvidia-smi, etc. See:

apt install nvidia-opencl-icd

The following additional packages will be installed:
  glx-alternative-mesa glx-alternative-nvidia glx-diversions libcuda1 libnvidia-cfg1 libnvidia-compiler libnvidia-ml1 libnvidia-ptxjitcompiler1 libpci3 nvidia-alternative
  nvidia-installer-cleanup nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-kernel-support nvidia-legacy-check nvidia-modprobe nvidia-opencl-common nvidia-persistenced nvidia-smi
  nvidia-support ocl-icd-libopencl1 pci.ids pciutils update-glx
Suggested packages:
  libgl1-mesa-glx | libgl1 nvidia-driver | nvidia-driver-any nvidia-cuda-mps wget | curl | lynx-cur
Recommended packages:
  libcuda1:i386
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  glx-alternative-mesa glx-alternative-nvidia glx-diversions libcuda1 libnvidia-cfg1 libnvidia-compiler libnvidia-ml1 libnvidia-ptxjitcompiler1 libpci3 nvidia-alternative
  nvidia-installer-cleanup nvidia-kernel-common nvidia-kernel-dkms nvidia-kernel-support nvidia-legacy-check nvidia-modprobe nvidia-opencl-common nvidia-opencl-icd
  nvidia-persistenced nvidia-smi nvidia-support ocl-icd-libopencl1 pci.ids pciutils update-glx
0 upgraded, 25 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 50.1 MB of archives.
After this operation, 157 MB of additional disk space will be used.

Now you need to reboot so that the proprietary Nvidia driver will be loaded.

Now you can list general information about your card by running nvidia-smi from the nvidia-smi package, or OpenCL capabilities by running clinfo from the clinfo package. This also works on headless machines.

Also see my related code repository: https://github.com/michaelfranzl/image_debian-gpgpu

If you found a mistake in this blog post, or would like to suggest an improvement to this blog post, please me an e-mail to michael@franzl.name; as subject please use the prefix "Comment to blog post" and append the post title.

Keywords: debianhardware