ubuntu-core-launcher nvidia driver detection is bogus

Thanks for your solution, was getting the same error.

This is indeed surprising that they are just checking the dirs for detecting multiple drivers.

I guess the latest update (2.12) triggered it. So we should expect more people to hit this bug.

Here's a workaround.

I have two nvidia directories under /usr/lib:

$ ls /usr/lib -l | grep " nvidia-"
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Apr 25 12:19 nvidia-304
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Apr 25 10:32 nvidia-352

Removing the unused one fixes the bug. First, figure out which one you're using:

$ dpkg -l |grep ^ii| grep nvidia-[0-9]
ii nvidia-304 304.131-0ubuntu3 amd64 NVIDIA legacy binary driver - version 304.131

Now, delete or rename any other nvidia-* directories (any that aren't the one in use):

$ sudo mv /usr/lib/nvidia-352 /usr/lib/old-nvidia-352

(I renamed mine rather than deleting it because I am extremely paranoid when it comes to mucking with video drivers in any way, but deleting it is probably totally fine, too.)

It would help if we knew how to identify the actually active driver

Kernel space is much more reliable, as the system can use only one nvidia kernel module at a time.

You can check the following file:

/sys/module/nvidia/version

and you will get something like 367.44 (the format being "$major_version.$minor_version\n"). You can pick the major version, and use that to determine which libraries to load, as the path is /usr/lib/nvidia-$major_version.

% cat /sys/module/nvidia/version
367.35
% dpkg-query -W nvidia*
nvidia-352 361.45.11-0ubuntu4
nvidia-361 367.35-0ubuntu1
nvidia-367 367.35-0ubuntu1
nvidia-common
nvidia-driver-binary
nvidia-legacy-340xx-vdpau-driver
nvidia-libopencl1-367
nvidia-libopencl1-dev
nvidia-opencl-icd
nvidia-opencl-icd-352 361.28-0ubuntu1
nvidia-opencl-icd-361 367.35-0ubuntu1
nvidia-opencl-icd-367 367.35-0ubuntu1
nvidia-persistenced
nvidia-prime 0.8.4
nvidia-settings 367.35-0ubuntu1
nvidia-settings-binary
nvidia-vdpau-driver

On IRC, it was recommended to just purge the older nvidia driver versions as a workaround. I'm about to try that and if I don't follow up then that probably wasn't a good idea. :)

FWIW I have a GeForce GTX 760/PCIe/SSE2

Although:

% ls /usr/lib -l | grep " nvidia-"
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Mar 4 23:16 nvidia-352/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 12288 Aug 10 16:53 nvidia-361/
drwxr-xr-x 6 root root 4096 Aug 10 16:54 nvidia-367/
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 Aug 10 16:53 nvidia-367-prime/

Purging nvidia-352 and nvidia-361 does not remove any of these subdirs.

Neither does purging fix the original bug.

Not to be a pain in the butt, but why is a hello-world snap that just does echo "hello world" doing anything with video drivers?

@Barry: 352 and 361 are transitional packages

This is fixed by this pull request: https://github.com/snapcore/snap-confine/pull/129 (still in progress).

Nate: to reply to your question. Currently snap-confine has special code for supporting nvidia and this code runs unconditionally. In the future it may be generalized enough that all the regular interface features that snapd can influence will be sufficient to support nvida. For now that is not the case.

I think this is a different issue to Bug #1574851 which is marked as a duplicate of this bug, as that happens even with only one nvidia version installed.

I have no machine available with an nvidia card, so I can't verify this one.

After the fix Blender and Krita started working, but I receive the same error for other snap like ubuntu-clock-app, chiche, rubecube. Any idea why some works and some don't?