I downloaded blender 2.80 a while back (from the blender website), and GPU compute works fine with that on my Gentoo Linux system with a GTX 1060. However, when I download and run 2.82a, blender locks up as soon as I either turn on Cycles and click on “GPU compute” under Device, or if I click on System in the preferences. In both cases, the blender windows instantly become unresponsive and blender uses up 100% of one CPU forever (as far as I can tell—I let it run for overnight).
I know gentoo is a bit unusual, but any hint as to what I can do to track down what’s going wrong?
Sounds like a driver issue to me. I always install the Nvidia driver manually on Linux Mint and I haven’t had any problems. I’m also running the latest version 440.64 which has helped with several programs (Substance Painter for one). That would be the first place I would check.
Thanks for the suggestion! I do already have the latest driver, 440.64, installed, but I’ll try installing it manually if I can’t figure anything else out.
Good thought, kkar. I checked with nvtop, and it look like blender never gets to the GPU. I just see a little graphics activity, just a little CUDA at first then nothing at all. Changing the tiles size (Performance > Tiles) didn’t make any difference; is that what you meant by “bucket size”?
Looking at the stack with gdb, it looks like blender is hanging calling ccl::device_optix_info, which calls cuDevicePrimaryCtxRetain in libcuda.so.1. This is a bit suspicious as the GTX 1060 doesn’t have the Optix ray tracing capability.
If I compile blender myself (somewhat painful), I get similar behavior when rendering (though I get a render window and now the hang is in cuCtxCreate_v2), but the preferences show up okay.