June 18, 2025

Fedora 42 -- CUDA toolkit from Nvidia

Back in June I installed the CUDA toolkit in order to play with a bit of CUDA programming on my fancy new Nvidia card.

The setup did not "just work" and needed some trickery to get all the packages installed for Fedora. After doing this, I got warnings from Fedora when I installed package upgrades.

Finally, on 11-29-2025 I did a long overdue "dnf update". It complained (as usual) about Nvidia package conflicts, but the show-stopper was that when it booted up to a new kernel I tried to rebuild akmod, failed, and then brought me up in a fallback mode with a barely useful reduced resolution.

The solution

I took a heavy handed approach. I looked at my notes for the names of all the CUDA packages I had installed, then removed them all. I also removed the akmod driver, then reinstalled it. Then I rebooted and the akmod rebuild worked and I am up and running. Perhaps someday I'll look into reinstalling the CUDA toolkit and figure out how to make it coexist with the Fedora akmod driver.

The details follow. I will note that some idiot removed the dnf erase command, renaming it to remove. I have deeply ingrained habits, so this was a plain nuisance. 

dnf remove cude-toolkit-12-9  (59 packages go)
dnf remove nvidia-open (18 packages go)
dnf remove cuda-drivers (nothing to do)
dnf remove xorg-x11-drv-nvidia-cuda (nothing to do)

dnf remove akmod-nvidia (52 packages)
dnf install akmod-nvidia
reboot
This brings me up running a 6.17.8-200 with proper resolution.
Have any comments? Questions? Drop me a line!

Adventures in Computing / tom@mmto.org