Nvidia driver for PPC64le

[Jerome Kieffer]

On Mon, 2 Sep 2019 17:28:27 +0200
Andreas Beckmann <anbe at debian.org> wrote:

> On 30/08/2019 17.13, Jerome Kieffer wrote:
> > Dear Debian Packagers,
> > 
> > We are about to install a cluster of IBM Power9 and wonder about the best
> > operating system ... Debian 10 looks the best but we are missing the
> > nvidia driver.
> > 
> > I did not find any reference for a ppc64le build of nvidia drivers in
> > debian. Is this because the user base is too small  
> 
> Nobody asked for it so far ;-)

That was also my feeling.
 
> > or is there another reason ?
> > As nvidia is distributing their driver for ubuntu, I guess re-packaging
> > should not be that difficult as it is already a binary package.  
> 
> This would require repacking the drivers released for Ubuntu in a
> similar way we create the ppc64el tarball for nvidia-cuda-toolkit.
> Should not be too difficult, but nobody looked into it, yet.
> 
> Please open a wishlist bug against src:nvidia-cuda-tookit, to better
> keep track of progress.

Thanks Andreas and the rest of the team for your work: for the last
years the nvidia driver are perfectly packaged even on
"elder" distributions and they work wonderfully on our numerous amd64
systems (many hundreeds computers). 

Concerning our "PowerPC setup", it is basically the same computers as in "Summit":
https://www.top500.org/list/2019/06/
except we have fewer computers and less GPU per box.

The driver is limited to "tesla" class chips targing GPU-computing, so
there are no graphics driver.
https://www.nvidia.com/Download/driverResults.aspx/149943/en-us 
This PPC64le installer is much smaller (~35MB) than the amd64 one as
there is no i386 nor any 32 bit version in it.

Apparently, you have already packaged the cuda driver which contains
the compiler for ppc64le.

Here is the content of the installer-file which it probably close to what is found in the amd64 driver:
10_nvidia.json
10_nvidia_wayland.json
html
kernel
libcuda.so.418.87.00
libEGL_nvidia.so.418.87.00
libEGL.so.1.1.0
libEGL.so.418.87.00
libGLdispatch.so.0
libGLESv1_CM_nvidia.so.418.87.00
libGLESv1_CM.so.1.2.0
libGLESv2_nvidia.so.418.87.00
libGLESv2.so.2.1.0
libGL.la
libGL.so.1.7.0
libGL.so.418.87.00
libglvnd_install_checker
libGLX_nvidia.so.418.87.00
libglxserver_nvidia.so.418.87.00
libGLX.so.0
libnvcuvid.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-cfg.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-eglcore.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-egl-wayland.so.1.1.2
libnvidia-encode.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-fatbinaryloader.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-glcore.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-glsi.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-glvkspirv.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-gtk2.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-ml.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-opencl.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-opticalflow.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-ptxjitcompiler.so.418.87.00
libnvidia-tls.so.418.87.00
libOpenCL.so.1.0.0
libOpenGL.so.0
libvdpau_nvidia.so.418.87.00
LICENSE
makeself-help-script.sh
makeself.sh
mkprecompiled
nvidia-application-profiles-418.87.00-key-documentation
nvidia-application-profiles-418.87.00-rc
nvidia-bug-report.sh
NVIDIA_Changelog
nvidia-cuda-mps-control
nvidia-cuda-mps-control.1.gz
nvidia-cuda-mps-server
nvidia-debugdump
nvidia-drm-outputclass.conf
nvidia_drv.so
nvidia.icd
nvidia_icd.json.template
nvidia-installer
nvidia-installer.1.gz
nvidia-modprobe
nvidia-modprobe.1.gz
nvidia-persistenced
nvidia-persistenced.1.gz
nvidia-persistenced-init.tar.bz2
nvidia-settings
nvidia-settings.1.gz
nvidia-settings.desktop
nvidia-settings.png
nvidia-smi
nvidia-smi.1.gz
nvidia-xconfig
nvidia-xconfig.1.gz
pkg-history.txt
README.txt

Thanks for your  help.

With my best regards,

Jérôme