Ubuntu-drivers autoinstall takes a long time

LXC
1

From within a container, does doing an ubuntu-drivers autoinstall usually take such a long time? It is nearly 30 minutes to update a bionic beaver.

Also is it possible to do an nvidia-smi from within the container?

2

Hi,

You marked this as LXC but I have done this with LXD instead.

From within LXC/LXD containers, you do not and cannot load Linux kernel modules.
The package ubuntu-drivers-common is likely looking for kernel modules but does not find any and gets stuck.

Having said that, if you want to run nvidia-smi in the container, you can do so (even CUDA).
Here are instructions from @stgraber, https://stgraber.org/2017/03/21/cuda-in-lxd/

For the case of LXD where you want to run games, CUDA, etc in the container with an NVidia GPU and the closed-source drivers:

  1. Follow the instructions at https://blog.simos.info/how-to-easily-run-graphics-accelerated-gui-apps-in-lxd-containers-on-your-ubuntu-desktop/ with the addition of installing the same nvidia driver package in the container as well. That is, if your host is running nvidia-driver-390, then install nvidia-driver-390 in the container as well (make sure you get the same minor version as well).

Well, that’s it. By installing the nvidia driver in the container, you get both the kernel driver but also the user-space libraries that match the kernel driver. The kernel driver/kernel module in the container is not used at all. However, the user-space libraries are matching the kernel driver from the host.

Then, you can run nvidia-smi, CUDA and games. From within the container.

1 Like
3

The end result is to run tensorflow from a container image. I’ve used nvidia-docker instead, and on first blush, nvidia-smi seems to work.

4

LXD actually supports libnvidia-container which is the same as used by nvidia-docker.

To get the equivalent, you need to have:

  • NVIDIA driver installed on host system
  • CUDA installed on host system (just the library is required)
  • Add the GPU device to your container
  • Set the nvidia.runtime config option to true

That last one is what causes libnvidia-container to be called and which will cause nvidia-smi and related libraries to be made available to the container without needing anything installed directly inside it.