Not able to run display application in BalenaOS container

I am having trouble getting an application to display through a BalenaOS container.

Currently running on:

  • Jetson Orin NX (arm64)
  • BalenaOS version: balenaOS 6.5.25+rev3 (l4t-r36.4)
  • Supervisor version: 17.0.2

The application itself is a Rust Tauri application with a Svelte frontend, and it’s sole purpose is for forwarding the HDMI output as a video stream (though for testing, at the moment, the Jetson Orin is directly connected to a monitor).

There’s two errors that occur when trying to get an application to display (depending on what we changed):

could not select device driver “” with capabilities: [[gpu]]

or

unable to open display “:0”

I’'ve double checked, and the “${DISPLAY}“ is set, and I’'ve tried the following things as well:

Is there something I am not thinking of/doing wrong, or is it actually not possible to run an application inside of a Balena container that displays something on a monitor/through the HDMI?

The only thing displayed on the monitor is always the standard Balena HostOS terminal.

Hello

From the error messages you shared, it seems that you are not running any window manager in the container?

You mentioned :

Tried the following base image “dustynv/ros:humble-desktop-l4t-r36.4.0“ along with a barebones Dockerfile including xeyes

Did you get similar error?

I would recommend trying to run x11 or xwayland and confirming the right drivers and configurations are present in your container before actually trying to run the tauri application

We have an example of running chromium browser GUI here: GitHub - balena-io-experimental/browser: A drop-in web browser block

An example for RPi5 where x11 conf had to be modified to properly use the GPU and driver browser/build/rpi/99-vc4.conf at master · balena-io-experimental/browser · GitHub

Hope this helps