How To Link A Shared Library (.so) To A CUDA Source File (.cu) Using Nvcc?

Currently, I'm compiling my CUDA source file using:

nvcc -O3 --shared -Xcompiler -fPIC -o CuFile.so CuFile.cu

I'd like to call functions from a shared library called GlobalFunctions.so.

How can I link the library to the CUDA source file?

So far, I've tried

nvcc -O3 --shared -Xcompiler -fPIC -lGlobalFunctions -o CuFile.so CuFile.cu

and a few variants, but nothing worked.

It seems evident to me that you are making some mistakes in library naming/usage/referencing, but since you don't show any actual output, I'll just make a suggestion. The changes below should make evident some of the errors (e.g. not preceding library name with lib, not specifying -L. or similar, etc.) I suspect none of this is unique or specific to CUDA/nvcc, as the behavior and command syntax with e.g. g++ should be more or less the same.

The following is one possible approach:

$ cat foo.cu
#include <stdio.h>
#include "foo.h"
void foo(){
  printf("Hello from foo\n");
}
$ cat foo.h
void foo();
$ cat CuFile.cu
#include "foo.h"
#include "CuFile.h"

void bar(){

  foo();
}
$ cat CuFile.h
void bar();
$ cat test.cu
#include "CuFile.h"

int main(){

  bar();
}
$ nvcc -O3 --shared -Xcompiler -fPIC -o libGlobalFunctions.so foo.cu
$ nvcc -O3 --shared -Xcompiler -fPIC  CuFile.cu -L. -lGlobalFunctions -o libCuFile.so
$ nvcc -O3 test.cu -o test -L. -lCuFile
$ ./test
Hello from foo
$

If your intermediate library is actually called GlobalFunctions.so and not libGlobalFunctions.so (and you don't wish to rename it) then one possible approach is just to pass it directly:

$ nvcc -O3 --shared -Xcompiler -fPIC CuFile.cu GlobalFunctions.so -o libCuFile.so

The -l switch for g++ and nvcc when specified like this: -lxyz will look for a library by the name of libxyz.so or libxyz.a. So if your library name doesn't begin with lib, then I don't know how to use the -l switch to reference it (perhaps there is a way). Also, when you have a library that is in the current directory, and you attempt to refer to that library with -l you must also use -L. to tell the linker to look there for that library. The linker doesn't automatically search the current directory for referenced libraries.

Again, I think all of this applies equally to g++, so if you can figure out how to do it with g++ you can probably figure out how to do it with nvcc.