Following this announcement and somewhat trying to follow this confusing thread, I

• installed Windows Version 10.0.20150 Build 20150
• installed NVidia Driver version 455.51
• installed Ubuntu 20.04 LTS from the Windows Store

I started Ubuntu and tried to run NVIDIA-SMI. It told me it wasn't there but that I could install it with one of these options:

Command 'nvidia-smi' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo apt install nvidia-340 # version 340.108-0ubuntu2, or
sudo apt install nvidia-utils-390 # version 390.132-0ubuntu2
sudo apt install nvidia-utils-435 # version 435.21-0ubuntu7
sudo apt install nvidia-utils-440 # version 440.82+really.440.64-0ubuntu6

Note that there is no nvidia-utils-450 option corresponding to my 455.51, which the NVidia thread above said somewhere is required to make things go. I then ran

sudo apt install nvidia-utils-440
nvidia-smi

and it said "No devices found".

Then I found this guide. I uninstalled Ubunto 20.04, and then followed the guide. The guide asked me to

• install a vanilla Ubuntu (no release number), which I did instead of 20.04. (This turns out to give me 20.04).
• install Windows Terminal (I chose the Preview version)
• check to receive updates for related Windows programs
• update the kernel to 4.9.121
• install NVIDIA CUDA drivers on Windows 10 (I already did 455, have to check the CUDA release)
• install Docker
• install NVidia Container Toolkit
• test

The "install docker" part of that guide seems to be buggy. I couldn't get docker service to start. So I uninstalled my Ubuntu and repeated the steps up to that point, without touching Docker. Then (my version), the steps from the Docker point are (for docker part I am following these instructions to get Docker):

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt update
sudo apt install apt-transport-https ca-certificates curl software-properties-common
curl -fsSL | sudo apt-key add -
sudo add-apt-repository "deb [arch=amd64] focal stable"
sudo apt update
apt-cache policy docker-ce
sudo apt install docker-ce
sudo systemctl status docker

The last step fails. I get this message:

$ sudo systemctl status docker
System has not been booted with systemd as init system (PID 1). Can't operate.
Failed to connect to bus: Host is down

That led me here and the 4th and almost lowest-scored answer seems to work, except it needs to be run in background mode:

sudo dockerd &
sudo usermod -aG docker your-user

Then I go back to the guide post-Docker install step and resume with

docker run --gpus all nbody -gpu -benchmark

and this fails with

ERRO[2020-06-23T07:28:28.582848400-04:00] 5cd9b9d7011ba20f72971dd27900b23b2c0f6be656b0bd53b9e178944fe4eba6 cleanup: failed to delete container from containerd: no such container
ERRO[2020-06-23T07:28:28.582946600-04:00] Handler for POST /v1.40/containers/5cd9b9d7011ba20f72971dd27900b23b2c0f6be656b0bd53b9e178944fe4eba6/start returned error: could not select device driver "" with capabilities: [[gpu]]
docker: Error response from daemon: could not select device driver "" with capabilities: [[gpu]].
ERRO[0018] error waiting for container: context canceled

Finally I went back to the NVidia announcement and did these steps:

sudo apt-get update
distribution=$(. /etc/os-release;echo $ID$VERSION_ID)
curl -s -L | sudo apt-key add -
curl -s -L | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-docker.list
curl -s -L | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/libnvidia-container-experimental.list
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-docker2
sudo dockerd &
docker run --gpus all nbody -gpu -benchmark

SUCCESS: and I got a happy result:

> Windowed mode
> Simulation data stored in video memory
> Single precision floating point simulation
> 1 Devices used for simulation
GPU Device 0: "Quadro M500M" with compute capability 5.0
> Compute 5.0 CUDA device: [Quadro M500M]
3072 bodies, total time for 10 iterations: 3.817 ms
= 24.724 billion interactions per second
= 494.487 single-precision GFLOP/s at 20 flops per interaction

HOWEVER, per answer below, there is no NVIDIA-SMI, per known NVIDIA limitations.

FURTHER NOTE: The docker container test above works on Ubuntu shell. It does not work on Windows Powershell Preview with the Ubuntu tab.

1

3 Answers

If nbody works then you have everything well configured. The problem is NVIDIA drivers limitations.

NVIDIA Management Library (NVML) APIs are not supported.

nvidia-smi is based on top of the NVIDIA Management Library (NVML).

An update to @onoma's answer. From :

6. nvidia-smi is not yet packaged for CUDA on WSL 2.

Hopefully this will be solved in future by nvidia.

An update as of Apr 25, 2022nvidia-smi is now supported on WSL2

After successful installation of CUDA following official nvidia doc:

wget
sudo mv cuda-wsl-ubuntu.pin /etc/apt/preferences.d/cuda-repository-pin-600
wget
sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-wsl-ubuntu-11-4-local_11.4.0-1_amd64.deb
sudo apt-key add /var/cuda-repo-wsl-ubuntu-11-4-local/7fa2af80.pub
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install cuda

You should have nvidia-smi available at usr/lib/wsl/lib/nvidia-smi so you can just add usr/lib/wsl/lib to PATH to easily run nvidia-smi.

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