If you are planning on transcoding using a Nvidia GPU, you will need to install a Nvidia driver. At the moment, certain driver versions such as 450 are known to cause issues with transcoding sometimes. In these scenarios, an orchestrator can end up with many “stuck” transcode sessions. The GPU starts to transcode a video segment, but never returns a result and the node thinks that the transcode session is actively transcoding segments when it is not actually being utilized. A signal of stuck transcode sessions if you see many “OrchestratorCapped” errors in the historical test results for your orchestrator on the leaderboard, but do not see any transcoding logs for your node.
The current recommendation to workaround these issues is to use the following driver versions which should not be impacted by these issues:
-
- See below for instructions.
If additional testing indicates that other driver versions are not impacted by these issues as well, this recommendation can be updated to include those versions.
The following instructions are for Linux users on Ubuntu 18.04.
Uninstall Existing Drivers
If you already have an existing Nvidia driver installed, you will need to uninstall it.
Install Driver 440
apt-key adv --fetch-keys https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/cuda-ubuntu1804.pin
sudo mv cuda-ubuntu1804.pin /etc/apt/preferences.d/cuda-repository-pin-600
add-apt-repository "deb http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1804/x86_64/ /"
apt install nvidia-driver-440
If you encounter an error during installation, you may need to fix missing or broken packages.
Thanks to @chris-chainflow for sharing the links for uninstalling existing Nvidia drivers and fixing missing or broken packages.