NVIDIA vGPU Driver Installation Guide

This guide walks you through preparing your Linux environment, downloading and extracting the driver packages, installing the NVIDIA grid driver with DKMS support, and applying your vGPU licensing.

Step 1: Update the Operating System

Ensure all system packages are up to date before installing kernel-level modules.

For RHEL / Rocky Linux:

sudo dnf upgrade -y

For Ubuntu / Debian:

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade -y

Step 2: Install Required Kernel Modules & Build Tools

The NVIDIA installer requires compilers and specific kernel headers to build the driver module against your running kernel.

[!IMPORTANT] Rocky Linux 10 / RHEL 10 Note: Modern RHEL-based distributions strip out hardware display modules from the base kernel package. You must install kernel-modules-extra to satisfy the driver's dependencies.

For RHEL / Rocky Linux:

sudo dnf install epel-release -y
sudo dnf group install "Development Tools" -y
sudo dnf install dkms kernel-devel-$(uname -r) kernel-headers-$(uname -r) kernel-modules-extra-$(uname -r) -y

For Ubuntu / Debian:

sudo apt install build-essential dkms linux-headers-$(uname -r) -y

Step 3: Download and Extract the Driver Package

Retrieve the NVIDIA vGPU driver package from the internal repository and extract its contents.

# Download the driver archive
curl -O https://sdsc-drivers.sdsc.edu/linux_nvidia_595.71.05.tar.gz

# Extract the archive
tar -xvf linux_nvidia_595.71.05.tar.gz

Step 4: Execute the NVIDIA Driver Installer

Navigate into the extracted directory and run the official NVIDIA .run script. The --dkms flag ensures the driver automatically rebuilds during future OS kernel updates.

cd linux_nvidia_595.71.05/
sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-595.71.05-grid.run --dkms

(Note: If the installer detects the open-source nouveau driver, allow it to create a blacklist file, reboot the server, and rerun this step.)

Step 5: Reboot the Server

A system reboot is required to initialize the new NVIDIA kernel modules into system memory.

sudo reboot

Step 6: Apply vGPU Licensing

Once the server is back online, navigate back to your directory and run the licensing script to apply the vGPU license.

cd linux_nvidia_595.71.05/
sudo bash ./nvidia_license.sh

Step 7: Verify Driver & License Status

Verify that the operating system successfully communicates with the graphics hardware and that the vGPU license is active.

nvidia-smi -q | grep -i License