Pre-requisite Software Installation Guide

This article describes all the pre-requisite steps needed before installing Apollo.

• Installing Ubuntu Linux
• Installing NVIDIA GPU Driver
• Installing Docker Engine
• Installing NVIDIA Container Toolkit

Working knowledge of Linux is assumed for successful software installation in this guide.

Installing Ubuntu Linux

Although other Linux distributions may be OK, we have only tested Apollo on Ubuntu systems. To be specific, Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (Bionic Beaver). So we would recommend using Ubuntu 18.04.5+ (including Ubuntu 20.04) as the host system.

The steps required to install Ubuntu 18.04+ are available at Tutorial from ubuntu.com on How to Install Ubuntu. Please follow the guide there for a successful Ubuntu installation.

Don't forget to perform software updates after the installation is done:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Internet access is needed for successful software updates. Make sure either WiFi or Ethernet cable is connected to a network with Internet access. You might need to configure the network for your host if the connected network is not using the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).

Installing NVIDIA GPU Driver

The Apollo runtime in the vehicle requires NVIDIA GPU Driver.

According to How to Install NVIDIA Driver, the recommended way for Ubuntu is to use the apt-get commands, or use an official "runfile" from www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/unix/

For Ubuntu 18.04+, you can simply run:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-add-repository multiverse
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install nvidia-driver-440

You can type nvidia-smi to check if NVIDIA GPU works fine on your host. (You may restart your host for the changes to take effect.) On success, the following message will be shown.

Prompt> nvidia-smi
Thu Sep  3 16:01:19 2020
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 440.33.01    Driver Version: 440.33.01    CUDA Version: 10.2     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GTX 1070    On   | 00000000:01:00.0  On |                  N/A |
| 26%   38C    P8    11W / 151W |    890MiB /  8114MiB |      0%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|    0      1290      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                            40MiB |
|    0      1426      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                          51MiB |
|    0      2411      G   /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg                           293MiB |
|    0      2571      G   /usr/bin/gnome-shell                         227MiB |
|    0      7071      G   ...AAAAAAAAAAAACAAAAAAAAAA= --shared-files   272MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Installing Docker Engine

Apollo 6.0+ requires Docker 19.03+ to work properly. Just follow the Install Docker Engine on Ubuntu doc to install docker engine.

Docker-CE on Ubuntu can also be setup using Docker’s official convenience script:

curl https://get.docker.com | sh
sudo systemctl start docker && sudo systemctl enable docker

You can choose whichever method you would prefer. Just don't forget the Post-installation Actions for Linux, esp. the section on Manage Docker as Non-root User and Configure Docker to Start on Boot.

There is also a dedicated bash script Apollo provides to ease Docker installation, which works both for X86_64 and AArch64 platforms.

Installing NVIDIA Container Toolkit

The NVIDIA Container Toolkit for Docker is required to run Apollo's CUDA based Docker images.

You can run the following to install NVIDIA Container Toolkit:

distribution=$(. /etc/os-release;echo $ID$VERSION_ID)
curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/gpgkey | sudo apt-key add -
curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/nvidia-docker/$distribution/nvidia-docker.list | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-docker.list
sudo apt-get -y update
sudo apt-get install -y nvidia-container-toolkit

Don't forget to restart the Docker daemon for the changes above to take effect.

sudo systemctl restart docker

Refer to NVIDIA Container Toolkit Installation Guide for more.

What's Next

With successful installation of the pre-requisites above, you can now move to "Git Clone Apollo Repo" section now.