NVIDIA persistence daemon continuously starting and stopping in syslog
Solution 1
Although this is an old problem, I've still encountered it myself on Kubuntu 18.04 and nvidia driver 390. Namely, the nvidia-persistence daemon spams the screen during boot (sometimes, not always). Thus, my solution circumvents the standard nvidia daemon startup on system boot by using a separate systemd service.
Like stated before, it seems to be a misconfiguration of starting the nvidia-persistence daemon. More precisely, the udev rules seem to be the problem for me. Thus, I modified /lib/udev/rules.d/71-nvidia.rules
and commented out the actions under power-off and power-on. Like mentioned in other answers, you may also comment out the lines for loading and unloading.
Now the daemon does not start on power-on. Consequently, we have to schedule the start of the daemon manually. We can achieve that by copying /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-persistenced.service
, e.g.
sudo cp /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-persistenced.service /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-persistenced-manual.service
Now modify /lib/systemd/system/nvidia-persistenced-manual.service
to look something like this:
[Unit]
Description=NVIDIA Persistence Daemon
Wants=syslog.target
Requires=local-fs.target
[Service]
Type=forking
User=root
Group=root
ExecStart=/usr/bin/nvidia-persistenced
ExecStopPost=/bin/rm -rf /var/run/nvidia-persistenced
[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target
To enable the service, execute
sudo systemctl enable nvidia-persistenced-manual.service
and if the old service is still enabled, run
sudo systemctl disable nvidia-persistenced.service
This way, the daemon will start on system startup. Feel free to modify the line ExecStart=/usr/bin/nvidia-persistenced
to e.g. include --verbose
or --user [...]
.
Keep in mind, that in my default way, the daemon is running with root permissions. If you do not want this, make sure to run the daemon with the --user
argument.
Altogether, this is not a perfect solution, but it was able to fix the bug on my system.
Solution 2
The entries are caused by an unnecessary configuration file from the Nvidia package:
- Run the command nvidia-smi from the shell, you must see somewhere on the left top "Persistence-M On".
- You can test if your Nvidia drivers work ok without "Persistence-M".
- Go to /lib/systemd/system/ . Here you will find a file called nvidia-persistenced.service. Rename or move.
- Go to /lib/udev/rules.d/
- Open as root the config file 71-nvidia.rules
- Comment out # the actions under power on and power off and loading and unloading.
- Restart and check.
Thanks to void75, forums.linuxmint.com
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Mena
I am a Java and Android developer. I have a 8+ years experience in Java, 1+ year with Android, and a short experience with C# against Windows 7 and WP8. I also speak five languages, and I am a native French and Italian speaker.
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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Mena over 1 year
I am on Ubuntu 17.10 and have both an intel and Nvidia GTX 1060 card (the latter usually selected), with driver version 387.22.
I have noticed the following entries in my
/var/log/syslog
:Nov 22 18:46:36 [machine name omitted] systemd[1]: Starting NVIDIA Persistence Daemon...
- [some unrelated entries]
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] systemd[1]: Started NVIDIA Persistence Daemon.
- [some unrelated entries]
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] systemd[1]: Stopping NVIDIA Persistence Daemon...
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] nvidia-persistenced: PID file unlocked.
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] nvidia-persistenced: PID file closed.
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] nvidia-persistenced: The daemon no longer has permission to remove its runtime data directory /var/run/nvidia-persistenced
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] nvidia-persistenced: Shutdown (1115)
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] gdm3: GdmDisplay: display lasted 1.202396 seconds
Nov 22 18:46:36 [...] systemd[1]: Stopped NVIDIA Persistence Daemon.
The weird part is that those entries (and a few related I might be omitting here) are occurring continuously, multiple times and sometimes within the same timestamp.
That sounds suspicious to me - why is the daemon continuously started and stopped this way and wouldn't that severely impact on performance?
I'm asking because I am still clueless as per why my machine performs so poorly (especially with regards to gaming) in 17.10, compared to 17.04 - see related question.
Obviously the desktop and dependencies are prime suspects here, not so much the driver version (as I recall seeing the exact same with a previous version).
Questions
- Is the above reflecting a normal behavior, and if not, how to investigate/fix it?
- Could that relate to performance issues when running demanding applications, such as games?
Edit
Interestingly, if I log on with the old Unity desktop, these log entries do not seem to occur. Performance also seems a lot snappier from a pure desktop perspective (although it might be my imagination), but the gaming performance is quite the same.
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delf over 4 yearsThis solved the problem for me on Ubuntu 18.04
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Mena over 3 yearsAwfully sorry for coming back this late - I overhauled the system back then and forgot all about this issue. I can't verify it works for me anymore but at least it did so for one user and the answer's well explained so I'm going to accept. Many thanks