nvidia-persistenced(1) General Commands Manual nvidia-persistenced(1)
NAME
nvidia-persistenced - A daemon to maintain persistent software state in
the NVIDIA driver.
SYNOPSIS
nvidia-persistenced
DESCRIPTION
The nvidia-persistenced utility is used to enable persistent software
state in the NVIDIA driver. When persistence mode is enabled, the dae-
mon prevents the driver from releasing device state when the device is
not in use. This can improve the startup time of new clients in this
scenario.
OPTIONS
-v, --version
Print the utility version and exit.
-h, --help
Print usage information for the command line options and exit.
-V, --verbose
Controls how much information is printed. By default, nvidia-per-
sistenced will only print errors and warnings to syslog for unex-
pected events, as well as startup and shutdown notices. Specify-
ing this flag will cause nvidia-persistenced to also print no-
tices to syslog on state transitions, such as when persistence
mode is enabled or disabled, and informational messages on
startup and exit.
-u USERNAME, --user=USERNAME
Runs nvidia-persistenced with the user permissions of the user
specified by the USERNAME argument. This user must have write ac-
cess to the /var/run/nvidia-persistenced directory. If this di-
rectory does not exist, nvidia-persistenced will attempt to cre-
ate it prior to changing the process user and group IDs. If this
option is not given, nvidia-persistenced will not attempt to
change the process user ID.
-g GROUPNAME, --group=GROUPNAME
Runs nvidia-persistenced with the group permissions of the group
specified by the GROUPNAME argument. If both this option and the
--user option are given, this option will take precedence when
determining the group ID to use. If this option is not given,
nvidia-persistenced will use the primary group ID of the user
specified by the --user option argument. If the --user option is
also not given, nvidia-persistenced will not attempt to change
the process group ID.
--persistence-mode, --no-persistence-mode
By default, nvidia-persistenced starts with persistence mode en-
abled for all devices. Use '--no-persistence-mode' to force per-
sistence mode off for all devices on startup.
--uvm-persistence-mode, --no-uvm-persistence-mode
By default, nvidia-persistenced starts with UVM persistence mode
disabled for all devices. Use '--uvm-persistence-mode' to force
UVM persistence mode for supported devices on startup. When UVM
persistence mode is enabled, a GPU cannot enter the PCI-Express
Runtime D3 low-power state. Refer to the NVIDIA Accelerated Linux
Graphics Driver README chapter on PCI-Express Runtime D3 (RTD3)
Power Management. Enabling UVM persistence mode may result in ad-
ditional GPU memory usage being reported, even when no applica-
tions are running.
--nvidia-cfg-path=PATH
The nvidia-cfg library is used to communicate with the NVIDIA
kernel module to query and manage GPUs in the system. This li-
brary is required by nvidia-persistenced. This option tells
nvidia-persistenced where to look for this library (in case it
cannot find it on its own). This option should normally not be
needed.
INSTALLATION
When installed by nvidia-installer , sample init scripts to start the
daemon for some of the more prevalent init systems are installed as the
compressed tarball /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/sample/nvidia-persis-
tenced-init.tar.bz2. These init scripts should be customized to the
user's distribution and installed in the proper location by the user to
run nvidia-persistenced on system initialization.
Once the init script is installed so that the daemon is running, users
should not normally need to manually interact with nvidia-persistenced:
the NVIDIA management utilities, such as nvidia-smi, can communicate
with it automatically as necessary to manage persistence mode.
See the "Using the nvidia-persistenced Utility" section of the NVIDIA
Linux Graphics Driver README for more background, information about in-
stalling the nvidia-persistenced utility to run on system initializa-
tion, and troubleshooting tips.
PRIVILEGES
The daemon does not require root privileges to run, and may safely be
run as an unprivileged user, given that its runtime directory,
/var/run/nvidia-persistenced, is created for and owned by that user
prior to starting the daemon. nvidia-persistenced also requires read
and write access to the NVIDIA character device files. If the permis-
sions of the device files have been altered through any of the NVreg_De-
viceFileUID, NVreg_DeviceFile_GID, or NVreg_DeviceFileMode NVIDIA kernel
module options, nvidia-persistenced will need to run as a suitable user.
If the daemon is started with root privileges, the --user option may be
used instead to indicate that the daemon should drop its privileges and
run as the specified user after setting up its runtime directory. Using
this option may cause the daemon to be unable to remove the
/var/run/nvidia-persistenced directory when it is killed, if the speci-
fied user does not have write permissions to /var/run. In this case,
directory removal should be handled by a post-execution script. See the
sample init scripts provided in /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/sam-
ple/nvidia-persistenced-init.tar.bz2 for examples of this behavior.
The daemon indirectly utilizes nvidia-modprobe via the nvidia-cfg li-
brary to load the NVIDIA kernel module and create the NVIDIA character
device files after the daemon has dropped its root privileges, if it had
any to begin with. If nvidia-modprobe is not installed, the daemon may
not be able to start properly if it is not run with root privileges.
OTHER
The source code to nvidia-persistenced is available here: ⟨https://
download.nvidia.com/XFree86/nvidia-persistenced/⟩
EXAMPLES
nvidia-persistenced
Starts the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon with persistence mode en-
abled for all NVIDIA devices.
nvidia-persistenced --no-persistence-mode
Starts the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon with persistence mode dis-
abled for all NVIDIA devices.
nvidia-persistenced --user=foo
Starts the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon so that it will run as user
'foo'.
AUTHOR
Will Davis
NVIDIA Corporation
SEE ALSO
nvidia-smi(1), nvidia-modprobe(1)
COPYRIGHT
Copyright © 2013-2016 NVIDIA Corporation.
nvidia-persistenced 615.71.09 2026-09-09 nvidia-persistenced(1)
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