Fix clw-gpu-denied: GPU Device Access Denied

Sat, 01 Aug 2026 17:32:04 +0800

1. Symptoms

When encountering the clw-gpu-denied error, you will observe the following indicators and shell outputs that signal GPU device access has been blocked or denied by the OpenClaw runtime environment.

Primary Error Indicators

The error typically manifests as a diagnostic message printed directly to the console or logged to stderr during computation initialization. You may encounter output resembling the following pattern:

[OpenClaw] ERROR: GPU device access denied
[OpenClaw] Code: clw-gpu-denied
[OpenClaw] Device: /dev/nvidia0 or CUDA:0
[OpenClaw] Reason: Insufficient permissions or device not accessible

Additional symptoms that frequently accompany this error include job failures that terminate immediately upon reaching GPU-intensive code sections, applications that fall back to CPU-only execution despite GPU hardware being present on the system, and runtime exceptions that reference DeviceAccessDenied or similar permission-related terminology. In containerized environments, you may also notice the container failing to start or crashing during initialization of GPU-accelerated workloads.

Fix clw-gpu-failure: OpenClaw GPU Initialization and Runtime Failure

Fri, 24 Jul 2026 15:08:04 +0800

1. Symptoms

The clw-gpu-failure error manifests when OpenClaw attempts to initialize, access, or utilize GPU resources for accelerated computation and encounters an unrecoverable state. This error typically surfaces during application startup, kernel compilation, or when submitting compute workloads to GPU devices.

Common indicators of this failure include terminal output containing the error signature followed by a descriptive sub-code:

[OpenClaw Error] clw-gpu-failure: DEVICE_INIT_FAILED
[OpenClaw Error] clw-gpu-failure: KERNEL_COMPILE_ERROR
[OpenClaw Error] clw-gpu-failure: RUNTIME_CRASH
[OpenClaw Error] clw-gpu-failure: MEMORY_ALLOCATION_FAILED

Additional symptoms may accompany the primary error message. Users frequently report incomplete GPU enumeration where the system identifies fewer devices than physically present, or zero devices reported despite dedicated graphics hardware being installed. Applications may hang indefinitely during GPU-bound operations, or crash with segmentation faults when attempting to access GPU memory addresses. Performance profiling tools may show GPU utilization remaining at zero percent despite active compute submissions, indicating that work batches are failing before reaching device execution queues.

Driver on ErrorVault — Developer Error Code Dictionary

Fix clw-gpu-denied: GPU Device Access Denied

1. Symptoms

Primary Error Indicators

Fix clw-gpu-failure: OpenClaw GPU Initialization and Runtime Failure

1. Symptoms