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Isaac Sim Notes

Unrelated to the hand project

This page documents a separate track: running NVIDIA Isaac Sim headlessly on the project maintainer's specific machine (Arch Linux, RTX 3070 Ti). The robotic hand is not simulated in Isaac Sim; that work moved to Gazebo. This runbook is kept for reference (or for other future robotics work on the same machine), not because the hand needs it.

The full runbook lives in the main repo: isaac-sim-setup.md.

Why it's documented at all

Getting Isaac Sim running reliably on this hardware/driver/kernel combination took real troubleshooting, and the working configuration is narrow enough that it's worth writing down rather than re-discovering:

  • Working NVIDIA driver range: R570-R580 (nvidia-open-dkms 580.119.02 confirmed working). Driver 610+ segfaults inside Isaac Sim's bundled RTX libraries due to an ABI mismatch. Driver 565.x fails to build against kernel ≥6.12 (missing kernel symbols).
  • Isaac Sim 4.5.0 doesn't work here (needs driver ≤565, which conflicts with the kernel constraint above). 5.1.0-rc.19 segfaults (unstable release candidate). Only 5.0.0 is confirmed stable.
  • The kernel and NVIDIA driver packages are pinned (IgnorePkg in /etc/pacman.conf) to stop pacman from silently upgrading past the working versions.
  • Docker's default runtime must be nvidia (in /etc/docker/daemon.json) for --runtime=nvidia container GPU access.
  • --network=host is required for the WebRTC streaming client to reach port 49100; the media stream itself uses UDP port 47998.
  • Only one WebRTC streaming client can connect at a time; NVENC (present on RTX, absent on datacenter GPUs like the A100) is required for streaming.

Common commands

Run headless with WebRTC streaming:

docker run --rm --runtime=nvidia --network=host -e ACCEPT_EULA=Y -e PRIVACY_CONSENT=Y \
  nvcr.io/nvidia/isaac-sim:5.0.0 ./runheadless.native.sh

Run a standalone script, no streaming viewer:

docker run --rm --runtime=nvidia -e ACCEPT_EULA=Y nvcr.io/nvidia/isaac-sim:5.0.0 \
  ./python.sh /isaac-sim/standalone_examples/api/omni.isaac.core/hello_world.py

ROS2 Humble ships bundled inside the isaac-sim:5.0.0 image, so no host ROS2 install is needed for this track (contrast with the Gazebo track, which uses ROS2 Jazzy on the host/in its own container).

See isaac-sim-setup.md in the main repo for the complete setup steps.