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The Driver Toolkit

Learn about the Driver Toolkit and how you can use it as a base image for driver containers for enabling special software and hardware devices on Kubernetes.

The Driver Toolkit is a Technology Preview feature only. Technology Preview features are not supported with Red Hat production service level agreements (SLAs) and might not be functionally complete. Red Hat does not recommend using them in production. These features provide early access to upcoming product features, enabling customers to test functionality and provide feedback during the development process.

For more information about the support scope of Red Hat Technology Preview features, see https://access.redhat.com/support/offerings/techpreview/.

About the Driver Toolkit

Background

The Driver Toolkit is a container image in the OpenShift Container Platform payload used as a base image on which you can build driver containers. The Driver Toolkit image contains the kernel packages commonly required as dependencies to build or install kernel modules, as well as a few tools needed in driver containers. The version of these packages will match the kernel version running on the Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) nodes in the corresponding OpenShift Container Platform release.

Driver containers are container images used for building and deploying out-of-tree kernel modules and drivers on container operating systems like RHCOS. Kernel modules and drivers are software libraries running with a high level of privilege in the operating system kernel. They extend the kernel functionalities or provide the hardware-specific code required to control new devices. Examples include hardware devices like Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA) or GPUs, and software-defined storage (SDS) solutions, such as Lustre parallel file systems, which require kernel modules on client machines. Driver containers are the first layer of the software stack used to enable these technologies on Kubernetes.

The list of kernel packages in the Driver Toolkit includes the following and their dependencies:

  • kernel-core

  • kernel-devel

  • kernel-headers

  • kernel-modules

  • kernel-modules-extra

In addition, the Driver Toolkit also includes the corresponding real-time kernel packages:

  • kernel-rt-core

  • kernel-rt-devel

  • kernel-rt-modules

  • kernel-rt-modules-extra

The Driver Toolkit also has several tools which are commonly needed to build and install kernel modules, including:

  • elfutils-libelf-devel

  • kmod

  • binutilskabi-dw

  • kernel-abi-whitelists

  • dependencies for the above

Purpose

Prior to the Driver Toolkit’s existence, you could install kernel packages in a pod or build config on OpenShift Container Platform using entitled builds or by installing from the kernel RPMs in the hosts machine-os-content. The Driver Toolkit simplifies the process by removing the entitlement step, and avoids the privileged operation of accessing the machine-os-content in a pod. The Driver Toolkit can also be used by partners who have access to pre-released OpenShift Container Platform versions to prebuild driver-containers for their hardware devices for future OpenShift Container Platform releases.

The Driver Toolkit is also used by the Special Resource Operator (SRO), which is currently available as a community Operator on OperatorHub. SRO supports out-of-tree and third-party kernel drivers and the support software for the underlying operating system. Users can create recipes for SRO to build and deploy a driver container, as well as support software like a device plugin, or metrics. Recipes can include a build config to build a driver container based on the Driver Toolkit, or SRO can deploy a prebuilt driver container.

Pulling the Driver Toolkit container image

The driver-toolkit image is available from the Container images section of the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog and in the OpenShift Container Platform release payload. The image corresponding to the most recent minor release of OpenShift Container Platform will be tagged with the version number in the catalog. The image URL for a specific release can be found using the oc adm CLI command.

Pulling the Driver Toolkit container image from registry.redhat.io

Instructions for pulling the driver-toolkit image from registry.redhat.io with podman or in OpenShift Container Platform can be found on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. The driver-toolkit image for the latest minor release will be tagged with the minor release version on registry.redhat.io for example registry.redhat.io/openshift4/driver-toolkit-rhel8:v4.8.

Finding the Driver Toolkit image URL in the payload

Prerequisites
Procedure

  1. The image URL of the driver-toolkit corresponding to a certain release can be extracted from the release image using the oc adm command:

    $ oc adm release info 4.8.0 --image-for=driver-toolkit
    Example output
    quay.io/openshift-release-dev/ocp-v4.0-art-dev@sha256:0fd84aee79606178b6561ac71f8540f404d518ae5deff45f6d6ac8f02636c7f4

  2. This image can be pulled using a valid pull secret, such as the pull secret required to install OpenShift Container Platform.

$ podman pull --authfile=path/to/pullsecret.json quay.io/openshift-release-dev/ocp-v4.0-art-dev@sha256:<SHA>

Using the Driver Toolkit

As an example, the Driver Toolkit can be used as the base image for building a very simple kernel module called simple-kmod.

Build and run the simple-kmod driver container on a cluster

Prerequisites

  • An OpenShift Container Platform cluster

  • Install the OpenShift CLI (oc).

  • Log in as a user with cluster-admin privileges.

Procedure

Create a namespace. For example:

$ oc new-project simple-kmod-demo

  1. The YAML defines an ImageStream for storing the simple-kmod driver container image, and a BuildConfig for building the container. Save this YAML as 0000-buildconfig.yaml.template.

    apiVersion: image.openshift.io/v1
kind: ImageStream
metadata:
  labels:
    app: simple-kmod-driver-container
  name: simple-kmod-driver-container
  namespace: simple-kmod-demo
spec: {}
---
apiVersion: build.openshift.io/v1
kind: BuildConfig
metadata:
  labels:
    app: simple-kmod-driver-build
  name: simple-kmod-driver-build
  namespace: simple-kmod-demo
spec:
  nodeSelector:
    node-role.kubernetes.io/worker: ""
  runPolicy: "Serial"
  triggers:
    - type: "ConfigChange"
    - type: "ImageChange"
  source:
    git:
      ref: "master"
      uri: "https://github.com/openshift-psap/kvc-simple-kmod.git"
    type: Git
    dockerfile: |
      FROM DRIVER_TOOLKIT_IMAGE

      WORKDIR /build/

      RUN yum -y install git make sudo gcc \
      && yum clean all \
      && rm -rf /var/cache/dnf

      # Expecting kmod software version as an input to the build
      ARG KMODVER

      # Grab the software from upstream
      RUN git clone https://github.com/openshift-psap/simple-kmod.git
      WORKDIR simple-kmod

      # Prep and build the module
      RUN make buildprep KVER=$(rpm -q --qf "%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}"  kernel-core) KMODVER=${KMODVER} \
      && make all       KVER=$(rpm -q --qf "%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}"  kernel-core) KMODVER=${KMODVER} \
      && make install   KVER=$(rpm -q --qf "%{VERSION}-%{RELEASE}.%{ARCH}"  kernel-core) KMODVER=${KMODVER}

      # Add the helper tools
      WORKDIR /root/kvc-simple-kmod
      ADD Makefile .
      ADD simple-kmod-lib.sh .
      ADD simple-kmod-wrapper.sh .
      ADD simple-kmod.conf .
      RUN mkdir -p /usr/lib/kvc/ \
      && mkdir -p /etc/kvc/ \
      && make install

      RUN systemctl enable kmods-via-containers@simple-kmod
  strategy:
    dockerStrategy:
      buildArgs:
        - name: KMODVER
          value: DEMO
  output:
    to:
      kind: ImageStreamTag
      name: simple-kmod-driver-container:demo

  2. Substitute the correct driver toolkit image for the OpenShift Container Platform version you are running in place of “DRIVER_TOOLKIT_IMAGE” with the following commands.

    $ OCP_VERSION=$(oc get clusterversion/version -ojsonpath={.status.desired.version})
    $ DRIVER_TOOLKIT_IMAGE=$(oc adm release info $OCP_VERSION --image-for=driver-toolkit)
    $ sed "s#DRIVER_TOOLKIT_IMAGE#${DRIVER_TOOLKIT_IMAGE}#" 0000-buildconfig.yaml.template > 0000-buildconfig.yaml

    The driver toolkit was introduced to OpenShift Container Platform 4.6 as of version 4.6.30, in 4.7 as of version 4.7.11, and in 4.8.

  3. Create the image stream and build config with

    $ oc create -f 0000-buildconfig.yaml

  4. After the builder pod completes successfully, deploy the driver container image as a DaemonSet.

    1. The driver container must run with the privileged security context in order to load the kernel modules on the host. The following YAML file contains the RBAC rules and the DaemonSet for running the driver container. Save this YAML as 1000-drivercontainer.yaml.

      apiVersion: v1
kind: ServiceAccount
metadata:
  name: simple-kmod-driver-container
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: Role
metadata:
  name: simple-kmod-driver-container
rules:
- apiGroups:
  - security.openshift.io
  resources:
  - securitycontextconstraints
  verbs:
  - use
  resourceNames:
  - privileged
---
apiVersion: rbac.authorization.k8s.io/v1
kind: RoleBinding
metadata:
  name: simple-kmod-driver-container
roleRef:
  apiGroup: rbac.authorization.k8s.io
  kind: Role
  name: simple-kmod-driver-container
subjects:
- kind: ServiceAccount
  name: simple-kmod-driver-container
userNames:
- system:serviceaccount:simple-kmod-demo:simple-kmod-driver-container
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: DaemonSet
metadata:
  name: simple-kmod-driver-container
spec:
  selector:
    matchLabels:
      app: simple-kmod-driver-container
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: simple-kmod-driver-container
    spec:
      serviceAccount: simple-kmod-driver-container
      serviceAccountName: simple-kmod-driver-container
      containers:
      - image: image-registry.openshift-image-registry.svc:5000/simple-kmod-demo/simple-kmod-driver-container:demo
        name: simple-kmod-driver-container
        imagePullPolicy: Always
        command: ["/sbin/init"]
        lifecycle:
          preStop:
            exec:
              command: ["/bin/sh", "-c", "systemctl stop kmods-via-containers@simple-kmod"]
        securityContext:
          privileged: true
      nodeSelector:
        node-role.kubernetes.io/worker: ""

    2. Create the RBAC rules and daemon set:

      $ oc create -f 1000-drivercontainer.yaml

  5. After the pods are running on the worker nodes, verify that the simple_kmod kernel module is loaded successfully on the host machines with lsmod.

    1. Verify that the pods are running:

      $ oc get pod -n simple-kmod-demo
      Example output
      NAME                                 READY   STATUS      RESTARTS   AGE
simple-kmod-driver-build-1-build     0/1     Completed   0          6m
simple-kmod-driver-container-b22fd   1/1     Running     0          40s
simple-kmod-driver-container-jz9vn   1/1     Running     0          40s
simple-kmod-driver-container-p45cc   1/1     Running     0          40s

    2. Execute the lsmod command in the driver container pod:

      $ oc exec -it pod/simple-kmod-driver-container-p45cc -- lsmod | grep simple
      Example output
      simple_procfs_kmod     16384  0
simple_kmod            16384  0