Nvidia driver dependencies and getting nvtop

[shotcollin]

Has anyone else had trouble recently installing Nvidia drivers or utilities, particularly nvtop, without installing drivers from version 470? I'm running Ubuntu 20.04.3 'focal' with linux-image-5.4.0-100-generic, which I don't think you'd exactly call bleeding-edge, but I've noticed recently that installing any driver before 470 via apt repos, including backports, forces an upgrade to 470, as does installing nvtop, which then breaks drivers installed otherwise.

I've also tried compiling 460 from source, but that also didn't seem to offer a way to avoid going up to 470, even though dpkg-shlibdeps produced repeated messages like warning: package could avoid a useless dependency if debian/libnvidia-extra-470/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libnvidia-allocator.so.470.103.01 was not linked against libpthread.so.0 (it uses none of the library's symbols).

I'm fairly sure that dependency linking is something new, because I've previously installed the nvidia-headless-460 and nvidia-utils-460 packages from the Ubuntu repo (probably a dozen times) and had no issues with them or with getting nvtop to work with them. But now that same apt command installs driver version 470. And when using the NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-460.91.03.run file to install the drivers, a newly installed nvtop has dependencies including libnvidia-compute-470 and when installed it gives an error that it's Impossible to initialize nvidia nvml : Driver/library version mismatch.

It's not like nvtop is some crucial piece of instrumentation or anything I can't happily survive without--I'm actually more wondering whether other people have noticed something like this or if it's just something I'm overlooking. I'm also wondering if this might be an indication that the 460 drivers are getting to an EOL stage that might make them more cumbersome to maintain if trying to keep the rest of the system relative up to date. Any thoughts?

[LexLuthr]

@shotcollin Were you able to figure out what was causing the problem?

[shotcollin]

@LexLuthr unfortunately, no, I didn't figure it out.

[LexLuthr]

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nvtop/+bug/1835630
It is a bug with Ubuntu, it seems ubuntu team added this dependency and it has been there for a while. Maybe you can follow up there.

[shotcollin]

Interesting, thanks for looking into that @LexLuthr! I'm actually now running workers as containers with Debian as host OS and Debian nvtop works fine, but good to know nvtop in Ubuntu is still a possibility. Appreciate your finding the solution!