Many applications require specialized hardware or software that depends on kernel modules or drivers. You can use driver containers to load out-of-tree kernel modules on Red Hat Enterprise Linux CoreOS (RHCOS) nodes. To deploy out-of-tree drivers during cluster installation, use the kmods-via-containers
framework. To load drivers or kernel modules on an existing OpenShift Container Platform cluster, OpenShift Container Platform offers several tools:
The Driver Toolkit is a container image that is a part of every OpenShift Container Platform release. It contains the kernel packages and other common dependencies that are needed to build a driver or kernel module. The Driver Toolkit can be used as a base image for driver container image builds on OpenShift Container Platform.
The Special Resource Operator (SRO) orchestrates the building and management of driver containers to load kernel modules and drivers on an existing OpenShift or Kubernetes cluster.
The Node Feature Discovery (NFD) Operator adds node labels for CPU capabilities, kernel version, PCIe device vendor IDs, and more.