Featured

How to Upgrade Manually to Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray"

  With the development cycle for Ubuntu 26.10 officially underway, Canonical has published stonking/snapshot-1 . For early adopters, developers, and enthusiasts looking to ride the absolute edge of the open-source wave, the temptation to jump from the stable shores of 26.04 LTS, Resolute Raccoon, into the development stream is strong. Because the automated release pathways are not populated so early in the cycle, the standard do-release-upgrade -d tool will politely decline to find the new branch. To make the leap, we must step past the guardrails and manage our repository tracking manually. > Important Prerequisite: Upgrading to a day-one snapshot moves your environment into a highly experimental space. Ensure all core personal files, configurations, and local development repositories are thoroughly backed up before executing these steps. Ubuntu 26.04 has transitioned to a modern, structured deb822 formatting layout for core package sources. This means standard mod...

NVTOP



NVTOP is a powerful, real-time GPU monitoring tool for Linux that provides a dynamic, interactive terminal user interface (TUI) to monitor NVIDIA GPUs and other vendors’ accelerators. It functions similarly to the Linux process monitor htop but is focused on graphics cards, giving users live stats such as GPU utilization, memory usage, temperature, power draw, and active processes in a visually rich ASCII format within the terminal.

Unlike the static output of tools like nvidia-smi, NVTOP offers a constantly updating and interactive display, allowing users to sort, filter, and zoom without leaving the terminal. It supports multi-GPU setups by displaying all GPUs side-by-side, making it especially useful for data scientists, AI researchers, gamers, and administrators managing high-performance or multi-user GPU environments.

NVTOP is built in C and uses the ncurses library for its terminal-based UI. It queries the NVIDIA Management Library (NVML) to collect GPU statistics and presents the data with minimal performance overhead, suitable for use during remote sessions via SSH or in terminal multiplexers like tmux or screen.

The main benefits and use cases of NVTOP include:

  • Debugging performance bottlenecks by instantly revealing GPU utilization and memory consumption.

  • Managing multi-user GPU resources in shared environments.

  • Optimizing cloud GPU fleet costs by identifying idle GPUs.

  • Monitoring GPU inside Docker or Kubernetes containers (if device access is enabled).

  • Real-time visibility for home users or server admins who want detailed GPU status without leaving the terminal.

  • Integration with scripts or automated alerts based on GPU state changes.

Installation on Ubuntu and many Linux systems is straightforward with package managers or building from source, requiring dependencies such as cmake and ncurses development libraries. Running nvtop launches the interactive UI showing up-to-date graphs and process lists.

In summary, NVTOP is a lightweight, terminal-based, real-time GPU monitor tool that offers a user-friendly and highly interactive experience for tracking NVIDIA GPU and accelerator performance on Linux. It enhances system observability for professionals and enthusiasts working with GPU-intensive applications.

Comments