NAME

       nvidia-persistenced - A daemon to maintain persistent software state in the NVIDIA driver.

SYNOPSIS

       nvidia-persistenced

DESCRIPTION

       The  nvidia-persistenced  utility is used to enable persistent software state in the NVIDIA driver.  When
       persistence mode is enabled, the daemon prevents the driver from releasing device state when  the  device
       is not in use.  This can improve the startup time of new clients in this scenario.

OPTIONS

       -v, --version
              Print the utility version and exit.

       -h, --help
              Print usage information for the command line options and exit.

       -V, --verbose
              Controls  how  much information is printed. By default, nvidia-persistenced will only print errors
              and warnings to syslog for unexpected events, as well as startup and shutdown notices.  Specifying
              this  flag  will  cause  nvidia-persistenced to also print notices to syslog on state transitions,
              such as when persistence mode is enabled or disabled, and informational messages  on  startup  and
              exit.

       -u USERNAME, --user=USERNAME
              Runs nvidia-persistenced with the user permissions of the user specified by the USERNAME argument.
              This  user must have write access to the /var/run/nvidia-persistenced directory. If this directory
              does not exist, nvidia-persistenced will attempt to create it prior to changing the  process  user
              and  group  IDs.  If  this option is not given, nvidia-persistenced will not attempt to change the
              process user ID.

       -g GROUPNAME, --group=GROUPNAME
              Runs nvidia-persistenced with the group permissions  of  the  group  specified  by  the  GROUPNAME
              argument.  If  both  this option and the --user option are given, this option will take precedence
              when determining the group ID to use. If this option is not given,  nvidia-persistenced  will  use
              the  primary group ID of the user specified by the --user option argument. If the --user option is
              also not given, nvidia-persistenced will not attempt to change the process group ID.

       --persistence-mode, --no-persistence-mode
              By default, nvidia-persistenced  starts  with  persistence  mode  enabled  for  all  devices.  Use
              '--no-persistence-mode' to force persistence mode off for all devices on startup.

       --uvm-persistence-mode, --no-uvm-persistence-mode
              UVM  persistence mode is only supported on the single GPU confidential computing configuration. By
              default, nvidia-persistenced starts with UVM  persistence  mode  disabled  for  all  devices.  Use
              '--uvm-persistence-mode' to force UVM persistence mode on for supported devices on startup.

       --nvidia-cfg-path=PATH
              The  nvidia-cfg  library  is used to communicate with the NVIDIA kernel module to query and manage
              GPUs  in  the  system.  This  library  is  required  by  nvidia-persistenced.  This  option  tells
              nvidia-persistenced  where  to  look for this library (in case it cannot find it on its own). This
              option should normally not be needed.

INSTALLATION

       When installed by nvidia-installer , sample init scripts to  start  the  daemon  for  some  of  the  more
       prevalent       init       systems       are      installed      as      the      compressed      tarball
       /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/sample/nvidia-persistenced-init.tar.bz2.   These  init  scripts  should  be
       customized  to  the  user's  distribution  and  installed  in  the  proper  location  by  the user to run
       nvidia-persistenced on system initialization.

       Once the init script is installed so that the daemon is  running,  users  should  not  normally  need  to
       manually  interact  with  nvidia-persistenced:  the  NVIDIA management utilities, such as nvidia-smi, can
       communicate with it automatically as necessary to manage persistence mode.

       See the "Using the nvidia-persistenced Utility" section of the NVIDIA Linux Graphics  Driver  README  for
       more  background,  information  about  installing  the  nvidia-persistenced  utility  to  run  on  system
       initialization, and troubleshooting tips.

PRIVILEGES

       The daemon does not require root privileges to run, and may safely be run as an unprivileged user,  given
       that  its runtime directory, /var/run/nvidia-persistenced, is created for and owned by that user prior to
       starting the daemon.  nvidia-persistenced also requires read and write access  to  the  NVIDIA  character
       device  files.   If  the  permissions  of  the  device  files  have  been  altered  through  any  of  the
       NVreg_DeviceFileUID,  NVreg_DeviceFile_GID,  or  NVreg_DeviceFileMode  NVIDIA  kernel   module   options,
       nvidia-persistenced will need to run as a suitable user.

       If the daemon is started with root privileges, the --user option may be used instead to indicate that the
       daemon  should  drop its privileges and run as the specified user after setting up its runtime directory.
       Using this option may cause the daemon to be unable to remove the /var/run/nvidia-persistenced  directory
       when  it  is  killed,  if  the specified user does not have write permissions to /var/run.  In this case,
       directory removal should be handled by a post-execution script.  See the sample init scripts provided  in
       /usr/share/doc/NVIDIA_GLX-1.0/sample/nvidia-persistenced-init.tar.bz2 for examples of this behavior.

       The  daemon  indirectly  utilizes  nvidia-modprobe  via  the nvidia-cfg library to load the NVIDIA kernel
       module and create the NVIDIA character device files after the daemon has dropped its root privileges,  if
       it  had  any  to  begin  with.   If nvidia-modprobe is not installed, the daemon may not be able to start
       properly if it is not run with root privileges.

OTHER

       The source code to nvidia-persistenced is available here: ⟨https://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/
       nvidia-persistenced/⟩

EXAMPLES

       nvidia-persistenced
              Starts the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon with persistence mode enabled for all NVIDIA devices.

       nvidia-persistenced --no-persistence-mode
              Starts the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon with persistence mode disabled for all NVIDIA devices.

       nvidia-persistenced --user=foo
              Starts the NVIDIA Persistence Daemon so that it will run as user 'foo'.

AUTHOR

       Will Davis
       NVIDIA Corporation

SEE ALSO

       nvidia-smi(1), nvidia-modprobe(1)

COPYRIGHT

       Copyright © 2013-2016 NVIDIA Corporation.

nvidia-persistenced 550.163.01                     2025-04-08                             nvidia-persistenced(1)