When I am waiting for Ubuntu to boot, I can see the splash screen but it often freezes or is sometimes really show. I would like to troubleshoot my system.

How can I switch the screen to see what is happening while I wait for Ubuntu to boot?

My classmates and I have pooled resources together to build a small Ubuntu research server.

The server has 128gb of RAM and I put the swap space on a dedicated SSD connected on the PCI bus. (/dev/nvme0n1) Samsung 960 EVO. System is a second hand Dell PowerEdge T430 with two processors.**

I am able to swapon the ssd but Ubuntu 16.04 is not using it. Swappiness is at 85, and vfs_cache_pressure set to 50.

# swapon --show
NAME         TYPE      SIZE USED PRIO
/dev/nvme0n1 partition 477G   0B   -1

$cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness && cat /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure
85
50

$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           125G         94G        8.8G         27M         22G         29G
Swap:          476G          0B        476G

# fdisk -l
Disk /dev/nvme0n1: 477 GiB, 512110190592 bytes, 1000215216 sectors
Units: sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes

$ ls /dev/nvme*
/dev/nvme0  /dev/nvme0n1

Is there something about having swap on a dedicated disk that could be causing this?

Attempts to fix it.

• I have tried to swapon and swapoff to fix it
• I have also tried to swapon a partition (p1) created on the ssd instead of the entire drive itself
• I have tried to mkswap /dev/nvme0n1 on the drive before swapon the disk

** All the RAM (4x32gb) is on the second processor (B1-B4) even-though the documentation says that the two CPUs must have identical RAM configurations. This was the only RAM seating that worked.

Goal

I am trying to use CUDA on my nvidia card for research. I don't really care to use it to manage my display as I plan on only using the computer via bash-shell after I finish setting it up.

Problem

My video card is unclaimed by Ubuntu. Bounce to login loop after signing in.

Background

I'm a linux-savy, power-user, computer science phd student, but I'm stumped trying to get my Nvidia gtx 1070Ti graphics card to work. I've been at this every sunday for over two months now.

I've followed these tutorials:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto/Nvidia
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BinaryDriverHowto
https://kislayabhi.github.io/Installing_CUDA_with_Ubuntu/
https://askubuntu.com/a/760935/13693
https://askubuntu.com/a/937204/13693
http://docs.nvidia.com/cuda/cuda-installation-guide-linux

Installing nvidia-current or nvidia-387 (default chosen when ubuntu installed) , or the latest nvidia-390 results in a boot loop where I'm bounced back to the login screen after login in.

So I used prime-select intel and removed the modeset=0 blacklist to get to a working desktop. So below is a review of my current status:

$ uname -a
Linux datalake2 4.13.0-36-generic #40~16.04.1-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 16 23:25:58 UTC 2018 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
$ lspci | grep VGA
03:00.0 VGA compatible controller: NVIDIA Corporation Device 1b82 (rev a1)
08:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Matrox Electronics Systems Ltd. G200eR2 (rev 01)
$ sudo lshw -C video
  *-display UNCLAIMED
       description: VGA compatible controller
       product: NVIDIA Corporation
       vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
       physical id: 0
       bus info: pci@0000:03:00.0
       version: a1
       width: 64 bits
       clock: 33MHz
       capabilities: pm msi pciexpress vga_controller cap_list
       configuration: latency=0
       resources: iomemory:33f0-33ef iomemory:33f0-33ef memory:91000000-91ffffff memory:33fe0000000-33fefffffff memory:33ff0000000-33ff1ffffff ioport:2000(size=128) memory:92080000-920fffff

$ apt list --installed | grep "nvidia"

nvidia-387/unknown,now 387.26-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]
nvidia-387-dev/unknown,now 387.26-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-cuda-dev/xenial,now 7.5.18-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-cuda-doc/xenial,xenial,now 7.5.18-0ubuntu1 all [installed,automatic]
nvidia-cuda-gdb/xenial,now 7.5.18-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-cuda-toolkit/xenial,now 7.5.18-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed]
nvidia-modprobe/unknown,now 387.26-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-opencl-dev/xenial,now 7.5.18-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-opencl-icd-387/unknown,now 387.26-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-prime/xenial,now 0.8.2 amd64 [installed]
nvidia-profiler/xenial,now 7.5.18-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-settings/unknown,now 387.26-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]
nvidia-visual-profiler/xenial,now 7.5.18-0ubuntu1 amd64 [installed,automatic]

$ cat /proc/driver/nvidia/version
cat: /proc/driver/nvidia/version: No such file or directory

Weirdness

My second problem seems to be that ubuntu is unable to recognize the need for drivers for my card, even-though I have enabled restricted propitiatory drivers.

sudo software-properties-gtk gives me nothing as well.

My gcc version:

I'm new to Ubuntu and I'm going through the official documentation. Can someone explain why the command sudo apt-get install -y boot-repair && boot-repair lists "boot-repair" twice?