Is this page helpful?

Compute-only and Desktop Installation#

Starting in 560, the driver allows a new custom installation method which includes only part of the driver for different use cases. This allows for a more granular installation with fewer dependencies, especially for compute-only systems where the desktop components would pull in a lot of extra libraries that then would go unused.

Depending on the operating system, it is now possible to install the driver in the following configurations:

  • Desktop: Contains all the X/Wayland drivers and libraries to allow running a GPU with power management enabled on a desktop system (laptop, workstation, and so on) but does not include any CUDA component.

  • Compute-only, or “headless”: Contains everything required to run CUDA applications on a GPU system where the GPU is not used to drive a display: a computational cluster, a workstation with a dedicated NVIDIA GPU, and so on.

  • Desktop and Compute: The canonical way of installing the driver, with every possible library and display component. This might be required in cross functional combinations, for CUDA-accelerated video encoding/decoding.

_images/driver-chart.png

This option is now supported for the following operating systems, with more to follow in future releases:

  • Amazon Linux 2023

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 / Rocky Linux 8 / Oracle Linux 8

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9 / Rocky Linux 9 / Oracle Linux 9

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 / Rocky Linux 10

  • Kylin 10

  • Fedora 42

  • OpenSUSE Leap 15

  • SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15

  • Debian 12

  • Ubuntu 22.04

  • Ubuntu 24.04

The installation of the driver for the following operating systems is provided exclusively in compute-only/headless mode:

  • Azure Linux 3

More information is available in the respective sections.