diagnose-driver-install

A troubleshooting guide for NVIDIA GPU driver failures on DeepOps-managed servers. It covers common cases such as missing GPUs, kernel-module mismatches, DKMS build errors, and GPU workloads that repeatedly crash.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to check GPU visibility, test NVIDIA drivers through Slurm, identify open versus proprietary kernel-module issues, and decide when to involve hardware support.
Why use it?
It helps distinguish a real driver problem from GPUs being hidden by SSH or Slurm, or from hardware and firmware issues. This can prevent unnecessary driver reinstalls.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/nvidia/deepops/diagnose-driver-install
Any agent
npx skills add NVIDIA/deepops --skill diagnose-driver-install
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/NVIDIA/deepops

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 47 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 762 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00047 $0.00762
Opus 5 $0.00023 $0.00381
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00152
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00076

Measured 2d ago against content hash b26eb40826be, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

diagnose-driver-install scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/diagnose-driver-install/SKILL.md · 83 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 83 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Diagnose an NVIDIA driver install

Work through these in order; most "driver failures" are one of the first three and need no reinstall.

1. Are you being fooled by GPU hiding?

On DeepOps Slurm nodes, GPUs are hidden from ordinary SSH sessions by design. Bare nvidia-smi over SSH reporting No devices were found on an otherwise healthy node is expected.

srun --gpus=1 nvidia-smi          # the authoritative test on Slurm nodes

If the srun job sees the GPU, the driver is fine. Stop here.

2. Is the hardware visible at all?

lspci | grep -i nvidia

No output → not a driver problem. The GPU is absent, unseated, or bound by VFIO passthrough or platform firmware; escalate to hardware support before touching software.

3. Open vs proprietary kernel modules

nvidia-smi: No devices were found immediately after a clean install is the classic symptom of the wrong module flavor for the GPU generation:

  • Turing and newer (T4, A100, H100, RTX PRO Blackwell): open kernel modules supported — DeepOps default nvidia_driver_ubuntu_use_open_kernel_modules: true is correct.
  • Pascal and older (P100, GTX 10xx): open modules are not supported — set nvidia_driver_ubuntu_use_open_kernel_modules: false in config/group_vars/all.yml and rerun the driver play.

Check what is loaded: modinfo nvidia | grep -i license (open modules say MIT/GPL, proprietary says NVIDIA).

4. Did the kernel module actually build and load?

dkms status                        # driver module state per kernel
dmesg | grep -iE 'nvidia|nvrm' | tail -20
lsmod | grep nvidia
  • DKMS shows an error for the running kernel → usually missing headers (linux-headers-$(uname -r)) or a kernel updated after the driver install. Install headers or reboot into the matching kernel, then rerun the driver play.
  • Module loaded but nvidia-smi fails → check dmesg for RmInitAdapter or fallen-off-the-bus errors; these are hardware/firmware territory.

Read the full file on GitHub · 83 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 2d ago First seen · 83 lines · 47 tokens per session scan A b26eb40826be

Subscribe to this mod's changes

diagnose-driver-install is a skill published in the GitHub repository NVIDIA/deepops (1,471 stars, last pushed today), licensed BSD-3-Clause. It adds 47 tokens to every session and 762 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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