Support for nvidia runtime on generic x86_64 systems

Hi,
Is running containers with nvidia runtime supported by balena for generic x86_64 systems?

Hey, welcome to the forums!

We don’t officially support the Nvidia container runtime, if that’s what you’re specifically asking about. We require all the libraries to be installed in the container image and GPU devices can be shared with the container. We are actively working to improve this experience though so stay tuned for future announcements.

That being said, I don’t think we have Nvidia video drivers loaded on our Generic x86_64 hosts. I’ll have to ask the devices team to be sure though.

Can you be more specific with your use case? What type of cards do you have installed, and what will the container be doing with access to the GPU?

We run the Nvidia RTX 2060 for object detection and other CUDA based calculations.

Hello @le13francois. Thanks for the info about your use case. You might be able to do everything within a container with some work. It would have to have build and load any relevant kernel modules and contain all the relevant nvidia libraries. See this think for an example of using a kernel module in a container: GitHub - balena-os/kernel-module-build: Example project for building an OOT kernel module in balena