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Description

nvidia-docker-plugin is a Docker Engine plugin designed to ease the process of deploying GPU-aware containers in heterogeneous environments. It acts as a daemon process, discovering host driver files and GPU devices and answers to volume mount requests originating from the Docker daemon.

The plugin also provides a REST API that one can query to get GPU information remotely or generate Docker arguments given volume names and device numbers.

Usage

The plugin daemon can be tuned using the following arguments:

Usage of nvidia-docker-plugin:
  -d string
    	Path where to store the volumes (default "/var/lib/nvidia-docker/volumes")
  -l string
    	Server listen address (default "localhost:3476")
  -s string
    	Path to the plugin socket (default "/run/docker/plugins")
  -v	Show the plugin version information

If you are using binary packages, those can be changed in the init configuration file: /etc/default/nvidia-docker or /etc/systemd/system/nvidia-docker.service.d/override.conf depending on your distribution.

Once the plugin is running, nvidia-docker will be able to connect to it and request information for containerization. In case you upgrade the NVIDIA drivers, you will need to restart the plugin.

REST API

By default, nvidia-docker-plugin serves its REST interface locally on port 3476. This will effectively prevent nvidia-docker from accessing the machine remotely through the http protocol (see remote deployments). This behavior can be changed using the -l usage option (e.g -l :1234 for the wildcard address port 1234).

REST endpoints are described below. Note that if a given client only cares about the latest API version, the version prefix can be omitted (i.e. /gpu/info is currently equivalent to /v1.0/gpu/info)

Version 1.0

  • GET /v1.0/gpu/info, /v1.0/gpu/info/json

Queries the GPU devices information (akin to nvidia-smi -q).
Response format is text/plain and application/json respectively.

  • GET /v1.0/gpu/status, /v1.0/gpu/status/json

Queries the GPU devices status (akin to nvidia-smi).
Response format is text/plain and application/json respectively.

  • GET /v1.0/docker/cli, /v1.0/docker/cli/json

Queries the command-line parameters to use with docker run or docker create.
It accepts two query-string parameters: dev for devices (akin to NV_GPU) and vol for volumes.
Response format is text/plain and application/json respectively.

This is useful if you don't want to rely on the nvidia-docker alternative CLI (see [[Internals]]). For example:
docker run -ti `curl -s http://localhost:3476/v1.0/docker/cli?dev=0+1\&vol=nvidia_driver` cuda

  • GET /v1.0/mesos/cli

Queries the command-line parameters to use when starting a Mesos agent.
Similar to /v1.0/gpu/info/json but compress and encodes the devices information in zlib / base64 (RFC 6920).

Known limitations

  1. NVIDIA driver installation needs to live on the same partition as the volume directory of the Docker plugin.
    nvidia-docker-plugin internally needs to create hard links to some driver files. Because of this, you need the NVIDIA driver (usually found under /usr) to be on the same partition as the Docker plugin volume directory (/var by default). Possible workarounds includes installing your NVIDIA driver at a different location (see --advanced-options of the installer) or changing your plugin volume directory (see nvidia-docker-plugin -d)

It is not recommended to place the nvidia-docker-plugin volume directory under the same directory structure as the NVIDIA drivers (i.e. /usr/lib, /usr/lib64 ...). This is due to the NVIDIA installer performing checks for conflicting files before performing an upgrade.