Chapter 2. Minimum Requirements
Prev | Part I. Installation and Configuration Instructions | Next

## Chapter 2. Minimum Requirements

## Minimum Hardware Requirements

The NVIDIA aarch64 Driver requires a supported NVIDIA GPU to be present in the system. See Appendix A, Supported NVIDIA GPU Products for a list of supported GPUs.

The NVIDIA aarch64 driver supports any supported discrete NVIDIA GPU connected to one of the following processors:

- NVIDIA Grace and later

- NVIDIA Tegra K1 (64-bit version)

- NVIDIA Tegra X1 or later

- AppliedMicro X-Gene

- Cavium ThunderX

## Minimum Software Requirements

Software Element | Supported versions | Check With...
--- | --- | ---
Linux kernel | 4.15 and newer | `cat /proc/version`
X.Org xserver | 1.17, 1.18, 1.19, 1.20, 21.1 | `Xorg -version`
Kernel modutils | 2.1.121 and newer | `insmod --version`
glibc | 2.27 | `/lib/libc.so.6`
libvdpau * | 0.2 | `pkg-config --modversion vdpau`
libvulkan ** | 1.0.61 | `pkg-config --modversion vulkan`
libcrypto (OpenSSL) *** | 1.1.1, 3.0 and newer | `openssl version`
Wayland **** | 1.20.0 and newer | `pkg-config --modversion wayland-client`

* Required for hardware-accelerated video playback. See Appendix G, VDPAU Support for more information.

** Required for applications which use the Vulkan API.

*** Required when the system operates in Confidential Compute mode. See the description of libnvidia-pkcs11 in Chapter 5, Listing of Installed Components for more information.

**** Required when running applications on Wayland-based desktop environments.

If you need to build the NVIDIA kernel module:

Software Element | Min Requirement | Check With...
--- | --- | ---
binutils | 2.9.5 | `size --version`
GNU make | 3.77 | `make --version`
gcc | 2.91.66 | `gcc --version`

All official stable kernel releases from 4.15 and up are supported; pre-release versions, such as 4.19-rc1, are not supported. The Linux kernel can be downloaded from http://www.kernel.org or one of its mirrors.

binutils and gcc can be retrieved from http://www.gnu.org or one of its mirrors.

Sometimes very recent X server versions are not supported immediately following release, but we aim to support all new versions as soon as possible. Support is not added for new X server versions until after the video driver ABI is frozen, which usually happens at the release candidate stage. Prerelease versions that are not release candidates, such as "1.10.99.1", are not supported.

If you are setting up the X Window System for the first time, it is often easier to begin with one of the open source drivers that ships with X.Org (either "vga", "vesa", or "fbdev"). Once your system is operating properly with the open source driver, you may then switch to the NVIDIA driver.

These software packages may also be available through your Linux distributor.

## Minimum CPU+GPU Coherent Memory Platform Requirements

A CPU+GPU coherent memory platform is a platform where the CPU and GPU are connected by a memory-coherent link. Grace Hopper is one such platform where the CPU and GPU are connected by a memory-coherent NVIDIA NVLink Chip-2-Chip (C2C) link.

These platforms require the Open Linux Kernel Modules. The installer by default selects the Open Linux Kernel Modules if it detects the presence of these platforms during installation.

These platforms require the Linux kernel "online_movable" mode to be enabled in order for GPU memory to be brought online when the driver adds GPU memory to the kernel. User-mode driver components, such as libcuda.so.1, will enable the Linux kernel auto online mode online_movable, by writing "online_movable" to the file /sys/devices/system/memory/auto_online_blocks, when it has sufficient privileges. When it doesn't have sufficient privileges, it invokes the nvidia-modprobe setuid tool to apply the setting. The system administrator is required to configure this manually if the driver is installed without nvidia-modprobe. The system administrator should also ensure auto online mode is not overridden by other components in the system.

Prev | Up | Next
Chapter 1. Introduction | Home | Chapter 3. Selecting and Downloading the NVIDIA Packages for Your System