Category: Tip

TIP:Fixing Black Screen After Installing CUDA SDK on Linux

I installed the CUDA SDK on Linux. The SDK also updates the NVIDIA video driver. After the installation had run a message printed saying that the installation had completed with errors. I checked the log file and saw the installation had failed on a driver installation. After rebooting the screen was black. The computer was still working and responding to network requests. It just couldn’t display anything. I was able to get the screen to work in safe mode but the video card otherwise was outputting all black pixels.

Thankfully since the computer still responded to network request I was able to SSH into it and use apt-get to get a new driver installed.

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-418

 

TIP: Creating a New CUDA Project with Visual Studio 2019

If you’ve installed Visual Studio 2019 and are trying to work with CUDA there are a couple of problems that you’ll encounter. The first is going to be an error that you receiving when trying to opan any CUDA project about missing properties. This is from the CUDA installer placing some of the files in the wrong place. It places the files based on what was in Visual Studio 2019 Preview. It was only recently that the full release of 2019 was made available (and for the full release theses files need to go into a different place). To work around that see this post for where to move the missing files to.

Once that is resolved the next problem is that the CUDA project templates are missing. An NVidia representative in the NVidia developer forums acknowledged the problem and says a fix will come in an upcoming release. Until then the current solution is to grab an existing CUDA project and rename it. If you need an existing CUDA project you can find them in the folder for the NVidia CUDA samples or download one from here:

https://devtalk.nvidia.com/cmd/default/download-comment-attachment/78613/

 

 

Tip: Installing CUDA SDK on Visual Studio 2019

If you try to install the nVidia CUDA SDK and plan to use Visual Studio 2019 there’s an additional manual step that you’ll need to take. The installer available for the current version of CUDA (10.1) doesn’t specifically target the recently released Visual Studio 2019, but it will mostly work with it. I say “mostly” because after installing it you’ll find that the CUDA related project templates are missing and you can’t open the sample projects.

Fixing this is as simple as copying a few files.  Copying everything from the following folder

C:\Program Files\NVIDIA GPU Computing Toolkit\CUDA\v10.1\extras\visual_studio_integration\MSBuildExtensions

Place it into this folder

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio\2019\Enterprise\MSBuild\Microsoft\VC\v160\BuildCustomizations

You may have to reply to administrative prompts. But once those files are copied you should have access to the project templates and the samples.