Nvidia Isaac Sim in Incus with ROS 1 Noetic
No more Distro Hopping for ROS 1 Noetic ...and no loss with Performance
This tutorial will not work with Nvidia GTX series cards, AMD Radeon cards, Integrated GPU's and don't try this on a Mac (even if you are stupid)
Testing Environment:
- CPU: Ryzen 5 5600x
- GPU: RTX 3060 Asus Phoenix V2
- RAM: 32 GB DDR4 3600Mhz
- SSD: 2TB NVMe Gen4
- OS: Pop_OS! 22.04 LTS
Prerequisites:
Nvidia Drivers:
Make sure the nvidia drivers are installed, I'm using Pop_OS! and the most recent version at the time of writing is 570. Check if the Nvidia Drivers are available using the following in the terminal
nvidia-smiOutput:
Wed May 21 20:40:52 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 570.133.07 Driver Version: 570.133.07 CUDA Version: 12.8 |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU Name Persistence-M | Bus-Id Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan Temp Perf Pwr:Usage/Cap | Memory-Usage | GPU-Util Compute M. |
| | | MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
| 0 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 Off | 00000000:07:00.0 Off | N/A |
| 30% 29C P8 9W / 170W | 90MiB / 12288MiB | 0% Default |
| | | N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes: |
| GPU GI CI PID Type Process name GPU Memory |
| ID ID Usage |
|=========================================================================================|
| 0 N/A N/A 1125 G /usr/lib/xorg/Xorg 56MiB |
| 0 N/A N/A 1511 G /usr/bin/gnome-shell 6MiB |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+Host
Create a New Container using Ubuntu 22.04
incus launch images:ubuntu/20.04 ros-noetic-rtxIf incus is not already installed and configured then use the following:
Add GUI Profile
incus profile add ros-noetic-rtx guiIf the gui profile has not been created before, then follow the tutorial below:
GPU Device Setup
incus config device add ros-noetic-rtx nvidia-icd disk source=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json path=/usr/share/vulkan/icd.d/nvidia_icd.json
incus config device add ros-noetic-rtx gpu gpu gputype=physical
incus config set ros-noetic-rtx nvidia.runtime=true
incus config set ros-noetic-rtx nvidia.driver.capabilities=all
incus config set ros-noetic-rtx nvidia.require.cuda trueRestart Container
incus restart ros-noetic-rtxEnter the Container
incus ubuntu ros-noetic-rtxContainer
Install Prerequisites
sudo apt install nano git curl zip axel vulkan-tools libvulkan1 mesa-utils software-properties-common x11-apps zenity -yInstall Conda
Install ROS 1 Noetic
Set Environment Variables
echo "export MESA_VK_DEVICE_SELECT=list vulkaninfo" >> ~/.bashrcInstall Isaac Sim
Validation
mamba activate env_isaaclab
source /opt/ros/humble/setup.bash
isaacsim isaacsim.exp.full.kit