nvidia-detector doesn't seem to detect nvidia

[Brian Murray]

bdmurray@flash:~$ grep nvidia /proc/modules
nvidia_uvm 757760 0 - Live 0x0000000000000000 (POE)
nvidia_drm 40960 1 - Live 0x0000000000000000 (POE)
nvidia_modeset 1110016 3 nvidia_drm, Live 0x0000000000000000 (POE)
nvidia 14360576 84 nvidia_uvm,nvidia_modeset, Live 0x0000000000000000 (POE)
drm_kms_helper 172032 1 nvidia_drm, Live 0x0000000000000000
drm 401408 4 nvidia_drm,drm_kms_helper, Live 0x0000000000000000
ipmi_msghandler 53248 2 nvidia,ipmi_devintf, Live 0x0000000000000000
bdmurray@flash:~$ nvidia-detector
none
bdmurray@flash:~$ cat /etc/lsb-release
DISTRIB_ID=Ubuntu
DISTRIB_RELEASE=18.04
DISTRIB_CODENAME=bionic
DISTRIB_DESCRIPTION="Ubuntu 18.04.1 LTS"

[Will Cooke (willcooke)]

Not a release blocker, so marking as not fixing. tseliot has said he would work on this though.

[Brian Murray (brian-murray)]

Its been a couple of months is anything happening with this?

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

From what I remember, nvidia-detector was never meant to detect anything other than obsolete nvidia drivers. It is, or was, only used by the nvidia-common debconf script.

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

note: I think, in your case, the output of nvidia-detector is correct, since you don't seem to have an obsolete driver installed. Also, the list of obsolete drivers hasn't been updated in a long time (LP: #1682291), and we have managed driver migrations using transitional packages.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Daniel Gibson (metalcaedes)]

> note: I think, in your case, the output of nvidia-detector is correct, since you don't seem to have an obsolete driver installed.

nope, it's supposed to "Return the recommended driver version", see https://github.com/tseliot/ubuntu-drivers-common/blob/138c91aae486f2449d374273ae3790800132f09f/NvidiaDetector/nvidiadetector.py#L40-L48

On my system (XUbuntu 20.04 with Geforce 970) it's what it does, it prints "nvidia-driver-470"
I think if it prints "None" that means that it couldn't find any nvidia GPU (or maybe at least none it knows a driver for?) on the system

[Alberto Milone (albertomilone)]

@Daniel: I should know, since I am the author. Please don't use nvidia-detector for that. You can use the ubuntu-drivers tool instead.

Have a look at the following wiki page on how to use ubuntu-drivers:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/NvidiaDriversInstallation