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Question

I'm using nvcc in a very standard way:

nvcc -ccbin g++ mycode.cu

And it's suddenly stopped working, giving the error:

nvcc fatal : Failed to detect host compiler properties

Why might this be?

Answer

In this case, the issue was caused by the root partition running out of memory, as verified by df -h:

/dev/nvme0n1p2      24G   23G     0 100% /

As a quick way to get memory back, I ran:

sudo apt clean

Which recovered 2.4GB.

After this, nvcc again works without problems.