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Comment by raverbashing | Hacker News Reader

No, you don't need to restart your machine after you install CUDA.

Also you might not need to restart after you install the drivers, this is not Windows. (But there might be some rmmod/modprobe needed)

> If your deep learning machine is not your primary work desktop, it helps to be able to access it remotely

Yes, use ssh.

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Your snark is outdated. Windows can upgrade graphics drivers without a reboot these days and even supports hotplugging GPUs to a limited extent. Meanwhile, like many others I regularly have to perform console surgery on my Linux machines when they fail to boot to X after fiddling with the graphics drivers. (My latest discovery is that Ubuntu's auto-updates will auto-destroy your NVIDIA drivers if you have an unexpected version of GCC set as default). Graphics drivers are emphatically not something Linux people should be crowing about to Windows users.

> My latest discovery is that Ubuntu's auto-updates will auto-destroy your NVIDIA drivers if you have an unexpected version of GCC set as default). Graphics drivers are emphatically not something Linux people should be crowing about to Windows users.

I have to agree. Especially when the Ubuntu package drivers ruin your system.

Yeah but do not blame Ubuntu or other distributors or Linux, but NVidia, who ship shitty proprietary drivers that do not integrate well in the *nix system.

I've had massive problems with my Nvidia gpu using anything but the open-source driver. I'm not sure how much performance I'm losing but it's worth not spending hours debugging.

> Also you might not need to restart after you install the drivers, this is not Windows.

Windows has been able to hotswap graphics drivers (and recover from driver crashes) for years now.

When I last used Windows a year ago, I had an "eject Nvidia GTX 760" in the right-click context menu next to usb drives. Never tried it though.

That's not supposed to happen with a normal graphics card, but ejecting GPUs is actually a thing now that Thunderbolt 3 supports external GPU docks.

When I tried to setup CUDA last, I had to reinstall Linux several times because I broke it so badly. Not Windows indeed.

You, or the CUDA packaging are doing something wrong then.

Installing a broken driver may cause the machine to not boot, fair enough, but CUDA should be straightforward.

Trying to install the Vulkan Beta driver on Linux broke the system, on windows it is happily crashing and restarting.

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