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Problem

I have had the same problem twice when I installing the Nvidia driver. The first time only me in server so the environment is purely, but the next time I have more partner in server, environment is much more complicated than the first time.

I spend more time than the first time, so I think I need to note how to solve it prevent I have this problem again.

Today, I use the following command to check my GPU state:

nvidia-smi

But the return information tell me the GPU driver is disappear (Occasionally this happens), I want to install it again.

So I use the command to do it:

sudo sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-440.64.run

But I got a bad news:

An NVIDIA kernel module 'nvidia-drm' appears to already be loaded in your kernel...

It seems I want to install a CUDA driver when I use GPU to startup the X-Window. If I want to solved it, I need to stop my GPU.

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Solution 1: Remove Nvidia driver

We can use the following instructions to remove the Nvidia driver:

sudo apt-get purge nvidia*
sudo apt-get autoremove
sudo reboot

After rebooting, we can install the driver again.

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Solution 2: Stop all processes use GPU

First, we need Super User authority.

sudo -i

And close all the processes use GPU, and disable nvidia driver:

systemctl isolate multi-user.target
modprobe -r nvidia-drm

And then we can reinstall the GPU driver.

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參考資料

• https://askubuntu.com/questions/830916/how-to-install-cuda-8-0-on-ubuntu-16-04-with-nvidia-geforce-gtx-1080
• https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/440840/how-to-unload-kernel-module-nvidia-drm