Version 515.105.01(Linux)/518.03(Windows)

Release notes for the Release 515 family of NVIDIA® Data Center GPU Drivers for Linux and Windows.

This edition of Release Notes describes the Release 515 family of NVIDIA® Data Center GPU Drivers for Linux and Windows. NVIDIA provides these notes to describe performance improvements, bug fixes and limitations in each documented version of the driver.

1. Version Highlights

This section provides highlights of the NVIDIA Data Center GPU R515 Driver (version 515.105.01 Linux and 518.03 Windows).

This version (515.105.01/518.03) marks the end of support and updates for the 515 Driver. Please note that no further security updates are planned. Forward Compatibility packages will remove support for this driver in a future CUDA Toolkit release.

For changes related to the 515 release of the NVIDIA display driver, review the file "NVIDIA_Changelog" available in the .run installer packages.

  • Linux driver release date: 3/30/2023
  • Windows driver release date: 3/30/2023

1.1. Software Versions

For this release, the software versions are as follows:

  • CUDA Toolkit 11: 11.7

    Note that starting with CUDA 11, individual components of the toolkit are versioned independently. For a full list of the individual versioned components (for example, nvcc, CUDA libraries, and so on), see the CUDA Toolkit Release Notes.

  • NVIDIA Data Center GPU Driver: 515.105.01 (Linux) / 518.03 (Windows)

  • Fabric Manager: 515.105.01 (Use nv-fabricmanager -v)

  • GPU VBIOS:

    • HGX A100 PG506
      • 92.00.45.00.03 SKU200 40GB air cooling (lidless)
      • 92.00.45.00.04 SKU202 40GB hybrid cooling (lidded)
      • 92.00.45.00.05 SKU210 80GB air cooling (lidless)
      • 92.00.45.00.06 SKU212 80GB hybrid cooling (lidded)
    • HGX A100 PG510
      • 92.00.81.00.01 SKU200 40GB air cooling (lidless)
      • 92.00.81.00.02 SKU202 40GB hybrid cooling (lidded)
      • 92.00.81.00.04 SKU210 80GB air cooling (lidless)
      • 92.00.81.00.05 SKU212 80GB hybrid cooling (lidded)
    • HGX A800 PG506
      • 92.00.A4.00.01 SKU215 80GB air cooling (lidless)
    • HGX A800 PG510
      • 92.00.A4.00.05 SKU215 80GB air cooling (lidless)
    • A100 PCIe P1001 SKU230
      • 92.00.90.00.04 (NVIDIA A100 PCIe)
    • A800 PCIe P1001
      • 92.00.A4.00.0C 40 GB SKU203 PCIe
      • 92.00.A4.00.0D 80 GB SKU235 PCIe
  • NVSwitch VBIOS: 92.10.14.00.01

  • NVFlash: 5.791

Due to a revision lock between the VBIOS and driver, VBIOS versions >= 92.00.18.00.00 must use corresponding drivers >= 450.36.01. Older VBIOS versions will work with newer drivers.

For more information on getting started with the NVIDIA Fabric Manager on NVSwitch-based systems (for example, NVIDIA HGX A100), refer to the Fabric Manager User Guide.

1.2. Fixed Issues

  • Resolved a kernel panic on A100 when using both MIG and DCGM. Pascal GPU page faults were hitting a NULL pointer dereference in the UVM driver while there was not enough system memory available to handle the faults.
  • Resolved an issue that sometimes caused abnormal BAR1 memory usage.
  • In the L1C submodule when the clock is gated, there is a corner case where the BLCG controller was not woken up from sleep state when an external submodule wants to use L1C. This was fixed by Switching the PROD value to disable L1C BLCG will not cause the hang in the chip until some other event wakes up the BLCG FSM.
  • nvidia-smi -q returns strange values on A100 and A16 GPUs.
  • Fixed an issue where the NVIDIA Linux GPU kernel driver was calling the Linux kernel scheduler while holding a lock with preemption disabled during event notification.
  • Fixed a race condition that can arise when calling cudaFreeAsync() and cudaDeviceSynchronize() from different threads.
  • In the code path related to allocating virtual address space, a call to reallocate memory for tracking structures was allocating less memory than needed, resulting in a potential memory trampler. The size of the reallocation is now correctly calculated.

1.3. Known Issues

General

  • A large number of call traces are seen while peer-to-peer between GPUs is torn down. This is expected and does not indicate any functional issues.
  • The GPU driver build system might not pick the Module.symvers file, produced when building the ofa_kernel module from MLNX_OFED, from the right subdirectory. Because of that, nvidia_peermem.ko does not have the right kernel symbol versions for the APIs exported by the IB core driver, and therefore it does not load correctly. That happens when using MLNX_OFED 5.5 or newer on a Linux Arm64 or ppc64le platform.
    To work around this issue, perform the following:
    1. Verify that nvidia_peermem.ko does not load correctly.
    2. Uninstall old MLNX_OFED if one was installed.
    3. Manually remove /usr/src/ofa_kernel/default if one exists.
    4. Install MLNX_OFED 5.5 or newer.
    5. Manually create a soft link:
       /usr/src/ofa_kernel/default -> /usr/src/ofa_kernel/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r)
    6. Reinstall the GPU driver.
  • On HGX A800 8-GPU systems, the nvswitch-audit tool will report 12 NVLinks per GPU. This is a switch configuration report and does not reflect the true number of NVLink interfaces available per-GPU, which remains 8.
  • Combining A800 and A100 SXM modules in a single server is not currently supported with this driver version.
  • Combining A800 and A100 PCIe with NVLink is not fully tested.
  • When switching between the Open and the legacy kernel modules on Ubuntu, use the following commands:

    In order to switch from open -> legacy:
    sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-kernel-open-515
    sudo apt-get install cuda-drivers-515
    In order to switch from legacy -> open:
    sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-kernel-source-515
    sudo apt-get install nvidia-kernel-open-515
    sudo apt-get install cuda-drivers-515
  • If you encounter an error on RHEL7 when installing with cuda-drivers-fabricmanager packages, use the following alternate instructions. For example:

    If you are upgrading from a different branch, for example to driver 515.65.01:

    new_version=515.65.01
    sudo yum swap nvidia-driver-latest-dkms nvidia-driver-latest-dkms-${new_version}
    sudo yum install nvidia-fabric-manager-${new_version}
  • When installing a driver on SLES15 or openSUSE15 that previously had an R515 driver installed, users need to run the following command afterwards to finalize the installation:

    sudo zypper install --force nvidia-gfxG05-kmp-default 

    Without doing this, users may see the kernel objects as missing.

  • nvidia-release-upgrade
    may report that not all updates have been installed and exit.
    When running the
    nvidia-release-upgrade
    command on DGX systems running DGX OS 4.99.x, it may exit and tell users: "Please install all available updates for your release before upgrading" even though all upgrades have been installed.
    Users who see this can run the following command:
    sudo apt install -y nvidia-fabricmanager-450/bionic-updates --allow-downgrades
    After running this, proceed with the regular upgrade steps:
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt full-upgrade -y 
    sudo apt install -y nvidia-release-upgrade 
    sudo nvidia-release-upgrade
  • By default, Fabric Manager runs as a systemd service. If using
    DAEMONIZE=0
    in the Fabric Manager configuration file, then the following steps may be required.
    1. Disable FM service from auto starting.
      systemctl disable nvidia-fabricmanager
    2. Once the system is booted, manually start FM process.
      /usr/bin/nv-fabricmanager -c /usr/share/nvidia/nvswitch/fabricmanager.cfg
      Note, since the process is not a daemon, the SSH/Shell prompt will not be returned (use another SSH shell for other activities or run FM as a background task).

GPU Performance Counters

The use of developer tools from NVIDIA that access various performance counters requires administrator privileges. See this note for more details. For example, reading NVLink utilization metrics from nvidia-smi (nvidia-smi nvlink -g 0) would require administrator privileges.

NoScanout Mode

NoScanout mode is no longer supported on NVIDIA Data Center GPU products. If NoScanout mode was previously used, then the following line in the “screen” section of /etc/X11/xorg.conf should be removed to ensure that X server starts on data center products:

Option         "UseDisplayDevice" "None"

NVIDIA Data Center GPU products now support one display of up to 4K resolution.

Unified Memory Support

CUDA and unified memory is not supported when used with Linux power management states S3/S4.

IMPU FRU for Volta GPUs

The driver does not support the IPMI FRU multi-record information structure for NVLink. See the Design Guide for Tesla P100 and Tesla V100-SXM2 for more information.

OpenCL 3.0 Known Issues

Device side enqueue

2. Virtualization

To make use of GPU passthrough with virtual machines running Windows and Linux, the hardware platform must support the following features:

  • A CPU with hardware-assisted instruction set virtualization: Intel VT-x or AMD-V.

  • Platform support for I/O DMA remapping.

  • On Intel platforms, the DMA remapper technology is called Intel VT-d.

  • On AMD platforms, it is called AMD IOMMU.

Support for these features varies by processor family, product, and system, and should be verified at the manufacturer's website.

The following hypervisors are supported for virtualization:

Hypervisor Notes
Citrix XenServer Version 6.0 and later
VMware vSphere (ESX / ESXi) Version 5.1 and later.
Red Hat KVM Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 with KVM
Microsoft Hyper-V

Windows Server 2016 Hyper-V Generation 2

Windows Server 2012 R2 Hyper-V

Data Center products now support one display of up to 4K resolution.

The following GPUs are supported for device passthrough for virtualization:

GPU Family Boards Supported
NVIDIA Ampere GPU Architecture NVIDIA A100, A40, A30, A16, A10
NVIDIA Turing NVIDIA T4
NVIDIA Volta NVIDIA V100
NVIDIA Pascal

Quadro: P2000, P4000, P5000, P6000, GP100

Tesla: P100, P40, P4

NVIDIA Maxwell

Quadro: K2200, M2000, M4000, M5000, M6000, M6000 24GB

Tesla: M60, M40, M6, M4

3. Hardware and Software Support

Support for these features varies by processor family, product, and system, and should be verified at the manufacturer's website.

Supported Operating Systems for NVIDIA Data Center GPUs

The Release 515 driver is supported on the following operating systems:

  • Windows x86_64 operating systems:

    • Microsoft Windows® Server 2022
    • Microsoft Windows® Server 2019

    • Microsoft Windows® Server 2016

    • Microsoft Windows® 11 21H2
    • Microsoft Windows® 10

  • The following table summarizes the supported Linux 64-bit distributions. For a complete list of distributions, kernel versions supported, see the CUDA Linux System Requirements documentation.

    Distribution x86_64 POWER Arm64 Server
    Debian 11.x (where x <= 6) Yes No No
    OpenSUSE Leap 15.x (where y <= 4) Yes No No
    Fedora 35 Yes No No
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.y (where y <= 1) Yes No Yes
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.y (where y <= 7) Yes Yes Yes
    Rocky Linux 8.y (where y <= 7) Yes No No
    Red Hat Enterprise Linux / CentOS 7.y (where y <= 9) Yes No No
    SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15.y (where y <= 4) Yes No Yes
    Ubuntu 22.04.z LTS (where z <= 1) Yes No Yes
    Ubuntu 20.04.z LTS (where z <= 5) Yes No Yes
    Ubuntu 18.04.z LTS (where z <= 6) Yes No No
    Note: This release was not tested with Rocky Linux 9.0

Supported Operating Systems and CPU Configurations for NVIDIA HGX A100

The Release 515 driver is validated with NVIDIA HGX A100 on the following operating systems and CPU configurations:

  • Linux 64-bit distributions:

    • Debian 11.6
    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8.7 (in 4/8/16-GPU configurations)

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.9 (in 4/8/16-GPU configurations)

    • Rocky Linux 8.7 (in 4/8/16-GPU configurations)

    • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.1 (in 4/8/16-GPU configurations)
    • CentOS Linux 7.9 (in 4/8/16-GPU configurations)

    • Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS (in 4/8/16-GPU configurations)

    • SUSE SLES 15.4 (in 4/8/16-GPU configurations)

  • Windows 64-bit distributions:
    • Windows Server 2019 (in 1/2/4/8-GPU configurations; 16-GPU configurations are currently not supported)

      Windows is supported only in shared NVSwitch virtualization configurations.

  • CPU Configurations:
    • AMD Rome in PCIe Gen4 mode

    • Intel Skylake/Cascade Lake (4-socket) in PCIe Gen3 mode

Supported Virtualization Configurations

The Release 515 driver is validated with NVIDIA HGX A100 on the following configurations:

  • Passthrough (full visibility of GPUs and NVSwitches to guest VMs):

    • 8-GPU configurations with Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS

  • Shared NVSwitch (guest VMs only have visibility of GPUs and full NVLink bandwidth between GPUs in the same guest VM):

    • 1/2/4/8/16-GPU configurations with Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS

API Support

This release supports the following APIs:

  • NVIDIA® CUDA® 11.7 for NVIDIA® MaxwellTM, PascalTM, VoltaTM, TuringTM, and NVIDIA Ampere architecture GPUs

  • OpenGL® 4.6

  • Vulkan® 1.3

  • DirectX 11

  • DirectX 12 (Windows 10)

  • Open Computing Language (OpenCLTM software) 3.0

Note that for using graphics APIs on Windows (such as OpenGL, Vulkan, DirectX 11, and DirectX 12) or any WDDM 2.0+ based functionality on Data Center GPUs, vGPU is required. See the vGPU documentation for more information.

Supported NVIDIA Data Center GPUs

The NVIDIA Data Center GPU driver package is designed for systems that have one or more Data Center GPU products installed. This release of the driver supports CUDA C/C++ applications and libraries that rely on the CUDA C Runtime and/or CUDA Driver API.

Attention: Release 470 was the last driver branch to support Data Center GPUs based on the NVIDIA Kepler architecture. This includes discontinued support for the following compute capabilities:
  • sm_30 (NVIDIA Kepler)
  • sm_32 (NVIDIA Kepler)
  • sm_35 (NVIDIA Kepler)
  • sm_37 (NVIDIA Kepler)
For more information on GPU products and compute capability, see https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus.
NVIDIA Server Platforms
Product Architecture
NVIDIA HGX A800 A800 and NVSwitch
NVIDIA HGX A100 A100 and NVSwitch
NVIDIA HGX-2 V100 and NVSwitch
RTX-Series / T-Series Products
Product GPU Architecture
NVIDIA RTX A6000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA RTX A5000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA RTX A4000 NVIDIA Ampere architecture
Quadro RTX 8000 NVIDIA Turing
Quadro RTX 6000 NVIDIA Turing
NVIDIA T1000 NVIDIA Turing
NVIDIA T600 NVIDIA Turing
NVIDIA T400 NVIDIA Turing
Data Center A-Series Products
Product GPU Architecture
NVIDIA A800 NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA A100X NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA A100

NVIDIA A100 80 GB PCIe

NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA A40 NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA A30. A30X NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA A16 NVIDIA Ampere architecture
NVIDIA A10, A10M NVIDIA Ampere architecture
Data Center T-Series Products
Product GPU Architecture
NVIDIA T4 NVIDIA Turing
Data Center V-Series Products
Product GPU Architecture
NVIDIA V100 Volta
Data Center P-Series Products
Product GPU Architecture
NVIDIA Tesla P100 NVIDIA Pascal
NVIDIA Tesla P40 NVIDIA Pascal
NVIDIA Tesla P4 NVIDIA Pascal
Data Center M-Class Products
Product GPU Architecture
NVIDIA Tesla M60 Maxwell
NVIDIA Tesla M40 24 GB Maxwell
NVIDIA Tesla M40 Maxwell
NVIDIA Tesla M6 Maxwell
NVIDIA Tesla M4 Maxwell

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