unable to build on Ubuntu 24.0 with cuda 12 etc

[davidbuzz]

supposed pre-requires as per the readme:

PHP 7.0 or later
CUDA Toolkit 8.0 or later
cuBLAS (included with CUDA Toolkit)
cuDNN 7.0 or later
C compiler (gcc/clang)
PHP development files
NVTX (optional, for profiling)

my versions:
$ php --version
PHP 8.4.10 (cli) (built: Jul 3 2025 12:42:27) (NTS)

$lspci | grep -i nvidia
01:00.0 3D controller: NVIDIA Corporation TU117GLM [Quadro T2000 Mobile / Max-Q] (rev a1)

$nvidia-smi | grep 'CUDA Version'
| NVIDIA-SMI 535.230.02 Driver Version: 535.230.02 CUDA Version: 12.2 |

$hostnamectl | grep Arch
Architecture: x86-64

$hostnamectl | grep "Operating System"
Operating System: Ubuntu 24.04 LTS

cuda / toolkit:
cuda-toolkit-12-9

$nvcc --version | grep release
Cuda compilation tools, release 12.0, V12.0.140

the command i ran to try to get all the prerequisites installed, absolutely not sure about this :
wget https://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu2404/x86_64/cuda-keyring_1.1-1_all.deb
sudo dpkg -i cuda-keyring_1.1-1_all.deb
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get -y install cuda-toolkit-12-9 cuda-nvcc-12-9 nvidia-cuda-toolkit cudnn9-cuda-12-9 nvidia-cudnn cuda-nvtx-12-9 libnvtoolsext1 libstdgpu-openmp-dev libcudnn9-headers-cuda-12 libcudnn9-dev-cuda-12 cudnn9 libcudnn-frontend-dev -o Dpkg::Options::="--force-overwrite"

suggestions.?

[davidbuzz]

one of the issues is that $cudnn_dir/include/cudnn.h no longer has CUDNN_MAJOR in it, its moved to $cudnn_dir/cudnn_version.h on my machine

i'm guessing a lots changes since toolkit 8 ?

[l4nos]

Thanks for raising David, I haven't noticed as ive not used the library for some time.

I think you're right though. I'll spend some time next week refactoring the library to add in compatibility.

[l4nos]

Sorry this one sat for a while, I've been busy on other projects. I finally got to dig into it properly and your build was hitting a few different problems at once, which is probably why none of the obvious fixes worked.

The big ones on my side:

• config.m4 was passing -arch=sm_30 to nvcc. CUDA 12 dropped Kepler entirely, so any 12.x toolkit rejects that flag immediately. The build now detects your GPU from nvidia-smi (the T2000 is sm_75) instead of hardcoding an arch.
• The convolution code used cudnnGetConvolutionForwardAlgorithm, which cuDNN 9 removed. It's on the _v7 API now for cuDNN 8 and 9.
• NVTX on CUDA 12 is header-only under nvtx3/, there's no libnvToolsExt to link anymore. We were requiring both the old header and the lib.
• Honestly the worst part: once I got past the flags, the extension still didn't compile. There were functions registered with PHP that had no implementation, a globals struct that didn't match what the code used, a missing <atomic> include. It had been broken for a while, the flag errors were just hiding it. In all honest I built this plugin with limited knowledge (2 years ago) and have learned an awful lot more about GPU computing since then, so apologies.

All of that is fixed in PR #3 which actually takes all the knowledge i've gained of CUDA in the last 2 years and implements a more compelling solution for PHP.

One thing on your end though: you've got both cuda-toolkit-12-9 (NVIDIA's repo) and nvidia-cuda-toolkit (Ubuntu's repo) installed, plus three different cuDNN packages. That's why nvcc says 12.0 but you have toolkit 12.9 on disk, your PATH is picking up a different install than you think. I'd clean that out first:

sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia-cuda-toolkit
sudo apt-get install -y cuda-toolkit-12-9 libcudnn9-dev-cuda-12 php-dev
export PATH=/usr/local/cuda/bin:$PATH

Worth knowing: your driver is 535, which caps you at CUDA runtime 12.2. The 12.9 toolkit targets a newer runtime, so either upgrade the driver or grab cuda-compat-12-9. The build script checks for this now and warns you instead of letting it blow up at load time.

Then:

git clone https://github.com/l4nos/php-cuda.git
cd php-cuda/plugin
./compile.sh --test

There's also a Dockerfile in the repo (Ubuntu 24.04 + CUDA 12.6 + cuDNN 9) if you want a known-good environment to compare against, and docs/INSTALL-UBUNTU.md has the full package list and a troubleshooting table.

Give it a go and let me know how you get on.