MX-Linux is known as the best Linux Distro for some years because it has a brilliant feature called MX-snapshot. To me, MX-Linux is essentially Ubuntu+OS_Snapshot. However, one major defect of MX-Linux is that its kernel has disabled ACPI so that after installing Nvidia driver, CUDA does not support GPU acceleration for PyTorch/Tensorflow/etc.
To overcome this drawback, you can either install a Ubuntu kernel by try-and-error or compile a kernel that support ACPI.
To compile a kernel step-by-step:
- Download a stable or long-term version Linux kernel from https://www.kernel.org/
- Make sure that essential building packages are installed
git fakeroot build-essential ncurses-dev xz-utils libssl-dev lz4 bc - Extract the kernel archive and cd into that folder
- Copy current kernel config (in /boot/config-$(uname -r)) into .config
- Revise the configuration, there are 3 interfaces:
make menuconfig (this is in console mode)
make gconfig (this requires GTK, suitable for gnome-desktop)
make xconfig (this requires Qt5, suitable for KDE-desktop, can be installed by `apt install qt5-default`) - In the configuration, for every kernel module there are 3 options:
y: the corresponding binary file is linked with vmlinux
n: do not build
m: although it will not link with vmlinux, it will be compiled and you can use modprobe or insmod to manually load the .ko kernel driver on demand - Compile the kernel, `make -j 4`
- Install kernel modules striping unneeded symbols,
make INSTALL_MOD_STRIP=1 modules_install -j 4 - To shrink the generated kernel image size, change `MODULES=most` into `MODULES=dep` in /etc/initramfs-tools/initramfs.conf
- Install kernel image into /boot, `make install -j 4`
- Now the main folder will be of huge size (>30GB), you need to cleanup the folder
make clean
find /lib/modules/<kernel_version>/ -iname "*.ko" -exec strip --strip-unneeded {} \;
After that, you can now rebuild and install Nvidia driver by either:
- rebooting into the new kernel and run:
dkms install nvidia/460.67
OR
- without rebooting, directly run:
dkms install nvidia/460.67 -k <kernel-version>
12. If you manually upgraded Nvidia driver, you also need to update initramfs, otherwise, your `/boot/initrd.img` will still contain the old-version driver.
