Sharing My Experience Resolving nvidia-smi Communication Errors on RTX 50 Series (Using nvidia-driver-570-open)

Recently, while setting up a new machine learning server, I encountered an issue where the NVIDIA driver failed to recognize the GPU (an RTX 5070 in my case). Running the nvidia-smi command returned the familiar error message: "nvidia-smi has failed because it couldn’t communicate with the nvidia driver". In this post, I want to share my experience resolving this specific NVIDIA driver error.

Attempting the Common Solution (Driver Reinstallation)

The most common first step is to completely remove and reinstall the NVIDIA drivers. However, this approach did not work for me.

The standard reinstallation process typically looks like this:

# Purge existing NVIDIA-related packages completely
sudo apt purge --autoremove 'nvidia*' 'libnvidia*'
# (Optional) Remove CUDA Toolkit installation path
sudo rm -rf /usr/local/cuda*
# Check for available installable driver versions
sudo ubuntu-drivers devices
# Automatically install the recommended driver
sudo ubuntu-drivers autoinstall

In my situation, the sudo ubuntu-drivers devices command yielded no output, indicating that the system couldn't automatically find a suitable driver.

Diagnosing the Potential Cause of the Error

I suspected the root cause might be a conflict arising from a previous driver reinstallation attempt. Even after trying to reinstall, the machine still failed to recognize the GPU, and checking the installed packages suggested potential version conflicts.

# Check installed NVIDIA-related packages
sudo dpkg -l | grep nvidia

Furthermore, issues related to minor driver versions can occur. For instance, installing a driver using a specific command (like sudo apt install nvidia-driver-570) might unintentionally install an older version (e.g., 570.124.06) that doesn't support certain hardware (like the RTX 5080), instead of the required newer version (e.g., 570.133.07). [Link]

A Feasible Solution: Using the “-open” Driver

Despite following the common solution steps and attempting a full driver reinstall (including trying to reinstall nvidia-driver-570), the nvidia-smi error persisted.

While searching for solutions, I came across a post describing how a similar driver-related error on an RTX 5080 was resolved by installing the “-open” driver variant. These drivers utilize NVIDIA’s open-source kernel modules. [Link]

The command that worked was:

sudo apt install nvidia-driver-570-open

Surprisingly, this method worked! After installing the -open version of the driver, the nvidia-smi command successfully communicated with the driver and correctly recognized the GPU.

Conclusion

Considering that both the RTX 5070 and RTX 5080 experienced similar issues, and the problem was resolved using the same -open driver installation approach, it seems plausible that this solution could be applicable to driver compatibility problems across the RTX 50 series.

I hope sharing this experience proves helpful to others facing similar NVIDIA driver challenges.