Ubuntu Mining

By Jeroz - Oct 27th, 2018

General Introduction

This guide will help you set up Ubuntu on your PC and help you start mining with NVIDIA GPUs. You will have to install Ubuntu first.

• You can download the ISO of 64 bit Ubuntu 18.04 here
• The easiest way is to install from a USB stick.
• Ubuntu provides very user friendly tutorials to guide you through the installation.

This guide will further guide you through the steps to set up your system NVIDIA CUDA drivers. This guide is heavily inspired on the more comprehensive guide by NVIDIA that also describes installation steps for other Linux distributions.

Pre-installation

Verify that you have a CUDA-Capable GPU

lspci | grep -i nvidia

If your graphics card is from NVIDIA and it is listed in http://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-gpus, your GPU is CUDA-capable.

Verify you have 64 bit Ubuntu 18.04

uname -m && cat /etc/*release

The x86_64 line indicates you are running on a 64-bit system. The remainder gives information about your distribution.

Verify gcc is installed

gcc --version

If an error message displays, you need to install the development tools from your Linux distribution or obtain a version of gcc and its accompanying toolchain from the Web.

Verify the System Kernel Headers

sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)

Install required third-party libraries

sudo apt-get install build-essential dkms freeglut3 freeglut3-dev libxi-dev libxmu-dev

Download and install the NVIDIA CUDA Toolkit

Download CUDA drivers

cd ~/Downloads
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.0.130-1_amd64.deb

Install CUDA drivers

sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1804_10.0.130-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install cuda

Post-installation Actions

Add location of CUDA drivers to the PATH

export PATH=/usr/local/cuda-10.0/bin${PATH:+:${PATH}}

Set configuration

sudo nvidia-xconfig -a --cool-bits=28 --allow-empty-initial-configuration

Installation verification

Verify the Driver Version

cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version

Should return the version

Verify the version of the CUDA Toolkit

nvcc -V

Should return the version

Verify GPUs are found

nvidia-smi

This will return something that looks like this (make sure all GPUs are found):

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 410.79       Driver Version: 410.79       CUDA Version: 10.0     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 106...  Off  | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 28%   29C    P8     8W / 120W |    674MiB /  6075MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                              

[OPTIONAL] Change power and or overclock settings

To overclock the cards you can adjust the settings in the NVIDIA applications that is listed in the applications list. This list is available in the lower left corner of the desktop. Most miners want to set their power to ~70% to save energy costs. This can be done by:

• Enable persistent mode so that settings persist after a reboot:

sudo nvidia-smi -pm 1

• Look up current power setting to figure out what ~70% needs to be:

nvidia-smi -i 0 -q -d POWER

• Change power setting (in my example I lower power from 120W to 100W):

sudo nvidia-smi -pl 100