NVIDIA CUDA 11.7 Brings Lazy Loading, Open GPU Kernel Driver Compatibility

Released on Wednesday alongside the R515 NVIDIA Linux driver beta and the open-source NVIDIA GPU kernel driver announcement was the launch of CUDA 11.7.

NVIDIA CUDA 11.7 Toolkit is now available as the latest feature update to NVIDIA's proprietary compute stack. CUDA 11.7 brings compatibility support for the new NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules and another significant highlight is the lazy loading support.

- Support for using the NVIDIA Open GPU Kernel Modules with CUDA 11.7 and the R515 beta driver.

- Lazy loading of compute kernels for possible "significant" device-side memory savings by deferring from loading at the beginning of a program to instead when the compute kernel is first called. The "CUDA_MODULE_LOADING=LAZY" environment variable controls this CUDA module lazy loading behavior.

- NVCC host compiler support for Clang 13.

- Various new features to Nsight Compute, CUPTI, NVPROF / Visual Profiler, and other CUDA Developer Tools.

- All color formats are now supported for Vulkan-CUDA interop support on Android and Tegra's L4T.

- Deprecating 32-bit compilation by NVCC for all GPUs.

- CentOS Linux 8 has also been removed from the CUDA Toolkit and replaced by Rocky Linux 8 support given the upstream CentOS 8 EOL.

More details on CUDA 11.7 via the release notes and CUDA 11.7 Windows/Linux downloads via developer.nvidia.com.