NVIDIA/libnvidia-container

NVIDIA/libnvidia-container

Description: NVIDIA container runtime library

Language: C

License: Apache-2.0

Stars: 1110

Forks: 263

Open issues: 8

Created: 2017-04-14T23:45:54Z

Pushed: 2026-06-14T18:52:20Z

Default branch: main

Fork: no

Archived: no

README:

libnvidia-container

This repository provides a library and a simple CLI utility to automatically configure GNU/Linux containers leveraging NVIDIA hardware.\ The implementation relies on kernel primitives and is designed to be agnostic of the container runtime.

Installing the library

From packages

Configure the package repository for your Linux distribution.

Install the packages:

libnvidia-container1
libnvidia-container-tools

From sources

With Docker:

# Generate docker images for a supported
make {ubuntu18.04, ubuntu16.04, debian10, debian9, centos7, amazonlinux2, opensuse-leap15.1}

# Or generate docker images for all supported distributions in the dist/ directory
make docker

The resulting images have the name nvidia/libnvidia-container/:

Without Docker:

make install

# Alternatively in order to customize the installation paths
DESTDIR=/path/to/root make install prefix=/usr

Using the library

Container runtime example

Refer to the nvidia-container-runtime project.

Command line example

# Setup a new set of namespaces
cd $(mktemp -d) && mkdir rootfs
sudo unshare --mount --pid --fork

# Setup a rootfs based on Ubuntu 16.04 inside the new namespaces
curl http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/ubuntu-base/releases/16.04/release/ubuntu-base-16.04.6-base-amd64.tar.gz | tar -C rootfs -xz
useradd -R $(realpath rootfs) -U -u 1000 -s /bin/bash nvidia
mount --bind rootfs rootfs
mount --make-private rootfs
cd rootfs

# Mount standard filesystems
mount -t proc none proc
mount -t sysfs none sys
mount -t tmpfs none tmp
mount -t tmpfs none run

# Isolate the first GPU device along with basic utilities
nvidia-container-cli --load-kmods configure --ldconfig=@/sbin/ldconfig.real --no-cgroups --utility --device 0 $(pwd)

# Change into the new rootfs
pivot_root . mnt
umount -l mnt
exec chroot --userspec 1000:1000 . env -i bash

# Run nvidia-smi from within the container
nvidia-smi -L

Copyright and License

This project is released under the BSD 3-clause license.

Additionally, this project can be dynamically linked with libelf from the elfutils package (https://sourceware.org/elfutils), in which case additional terms apply.\ Refer to NOTICE for more information.

Issues and Contributing

[Checkout the Contributing document!](CONTRIBUTING.md)

• Please let us know by filing a new issue
• You can contribute by opening a pull request