Overview

This page provides an explanation and solutions for the following error message from the NVIDIA nvprof command line profiler:
The user does not have permission to profile on the target device.
For general information about this error including Solutions and Administration, please see NVIDIA Development Tools Solutions - ERR_NVGPUCTRPERM: Permission issue with Performance Counters.

Solutions for this issue

To get the desired behavior (see chart below) when profiling and tracing,

Have a system administrator enable access to the NVIDIA performance counters using the Administration instructions
Run the application being profiled with administrative privileges

On Windows targets: Launch the target application by right-clicking on the application and selecting "Run as administrator"
On Linux targets: Launch the target application with 'sudo' or as a user with the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability set

For the nvprof command line profiler found in the CUDA Toolkit version 10.2

Mode^[1]	User^[2]	Expected Behavior
Restricted Profiling	Admin^[3]	Profiling and tracing produce normal results
Restricted Profiling	non-Admin	Tracing produces normal results No Profiling is possible. All attempts to profile will result in output with only the following error message: The user does not have permission to profile on the target device. See the following link for instructions to enable permissions and get more information: http://www.open-lab.net/ERR_NVGPUCTRPERM"
Unrestricted Profiling	Admin^[3]	Profiling and tracing produce normal results
Unrestricted Profiling	non-Admin	Profiling and tracing produce normal results
[1] Mode set by system administrator using the Administration instructions [2] Privilege level of user running target application being profiled on target device [3] Admin user privilege achieved by On Windows targets: Launching the target application by right-clicking on the application and selecting "Run as administrator" On Linux targets: Launching the target application with 'sudo' or as a user with the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability set

For the nvprof command line profiler found in the CUDA Toolkit version 10.1

Mode^[1]	User^[2]	Expected Behavior
Restricted Profiling	Admin^[3]	Profiling and tracing produce normal results
Restricted Profiling	non-Admin	No Profiling or Tracing is possible. All attempts to profile will result in output with only the following error message: The user does not have permission to profile on the target device. See the following link for instructions to enable permissions and get more information: http://www.open-lab.net/ERR_NVGPUCTRPERM"
Unrestricted Profiling	Admin^[3]	Profiling and tracing produce normal results
Unrestricted Profiling	non-Admin	Profiling and tracing produce normal results
[1] Mode set by system administrator using the Administration instructions [2] Privilege level of user running target application being profiled on target device [3] Admin user privilege achieved by On Windows targets: Launching the target application by right-clicking on the application and selecting "Run as administrator" On Linux targets: Launching the target application with 'sudo' or as a user with the CAP_SYS_ADMIN capability set