NVIDIA NVML Driver/library version mismatch

Question

When I run nvidia-smi I get the following message:

Failed to initialize NVML: Driver/library version mismatch

An hour ago I receiv

Answer 1

So I was having this problem, none of the other remedies worked. The error message was opaque, but checking dmesg was key:

[   10.118255] NVRM: API mismatch: the client has the version 410.79, but
           NVRM: this kernel module has the version 384.130.  Please
           NVRM: make sure that this kernel module and all NVIDIA driver
           NVRM: components have the same version.

However I had completely removed the 384 version, and removed any remaining kernel drivers nvidia-384*. But even after reboot, I was still getting this. Seeing this meant that the kernel was still compiled to reference 384, but was only finding 410. So I recompiled my kernel:

# uname -a # find the kernel it's using
Linux blah 4.13.0-43-generic #48~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Thu May 17 12:56:46 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
# update-initramfs -c -k 4.13.0-43-generic #recompile it
# reboot

And then it worked.

After removing 384, I still had 384 files in: /var/lib/dkms/nvidia-XXX/XXX.YY/4.13.0-43-generic/x86_64/module /lib/modules/4.13.0-43-generic/kernel/drivers

I recommend using the locate command (not installed by default) rather than searching the filesystem every time.