any tips on installing an eGPU on ubuntu?

[hamishcunningham]

I picked up a GTX 1070 and eGPU enclosure to run WIS, and connected them over Thunderbolt 3 to my Lenovo X1 running 22.04. I installed nvidia-driver-530 and rebooted, but the driver doesn't load or the machine see the GPU...

I get various errors reporting that the driver installed, e.g.:

$ nvidia-smi 
NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running.

I've tried both XOrg and Wayland, and tried
setting Option "AllowExternalGpus" "True" in /usr/share/X11/xorg.conf.d/10-nvidia.conf.

Both hwinfo --gfxcard and lspci |grep VGA report the built in Intel graphics, but not the eGPU.

Any ideas? Tnx!

[hamishcunningham]

The answer was make sure the nvidia driver is loading properly (lsmod |grep nvidia) and then boltctl list and boltctl authorize the UUIDs of the eGPU enclosure.

(Note that it was the download_models.sh install step that failed before sorting out the GPU...)