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README.md

The nvidia-mig-manager.service

The nvidia-mig-manager.service is a systemd service and a set of support hooks that extend nvidia-mig-parted to provide the following features:

  1. When applying a MIG mode change, shutdown (and restart) a user-specific set of NVIDIA driver clients so that a GPU reset can be applied to persist the MIG mode setting. A list of common clients is provided by default, but users can customize this list to their own particular needs. Please see the provided hooks.sh and hooks.yaml files for details on what is run and how to change it.

  2. When applying a MIG device configuration, shutdown (and restart) a user-specific set of services so that they will pick up any MIG device changes once they come back online. Common services such as the k8s-device-plugin, gpu-feature-discovery and dcgm-exporter are provided by default, but this list can be customized as needed. Please see the provided hooks.sh and hooks.yaml files for details on what is run and how to change it.

  3. Persist MIG device configurations across node reboots. So long as the provided hooks.yaml file is used when performing any desired MIG configurations, those changes will be reapplied every time the node reboots.

  4. Apply MIG mode changes without requiring the NVIDIA driver to be installed or loaded. Situations where this is important are outlined in more detail below.

  5. When a node is first coming online, automatically reboot it (if required) to force MIG mode changes to take effect when GPU reset is unavailable (i.e. under GPU Passthrough virtualization). A failsafe is in place to ensure that such reboots only happen once without manual interventions if things go wrong.

To install the nvidia-mig-manager.service simply run ./install.sh from the directory where this README is located.

Note: At the moment, docker is a prerequisite to this installation because it runs a container with go in it to download and build the latest nvidia-mig-parted before installing it. We plan to relax this requirement in the near future.

The following files will be added as part of this installation:

  • /usr/bin/nvidia-mig-parted
  • /usr/lib/systemd/system/nvidia-mig-manager.service
  • /etc/systemd/system/nvidia-mig-manager.service.d/override.conf
  • /etc/profile.d/nvidia-mig-parted.sh
  • /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/utils.sh
  • /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/service.sh
  • /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.sh
  • /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.yaml
  • /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/config.yaml

Users should only need to customize the config.yaml (to add any user-specific MIG configurations they would like to apply) and the hooks.sh and hooks.yaml files (to add any user specific services that need to be shutdown and restarted when applying a MIG configuration).

Once installed, new MIG configurations can be applied at any time by running nvidia-mig-parted apply and pointing it at the config.yaml and hooks.yaml files in /etc/nvidia-mig-manager.

By default, environment variables for the config and hooks files are set in /etc/profile.d/nvidia-mig-parted.sh as part of this installation. Meaning that once this service is installed, anytime you login, these variables should be set for you:

export MIG_PARTED_CONFIG_FILE=/etc/nvidia-mig-manager/config.yaml
export MIG_PARTED_HOOKS_FILE=/etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.yaml

NOTE: The files in /etc/profile.d/ are not sourced when running commands under sudo. If elevated permissions are required to run nvidia-mig-manager the --config-file (-f) and --hooks-file (-k) options must be explicitly specified as follows:

nvidia-mig-parted apply -f /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/config.yaml -k /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.yaml

(An alternative is to ensure that the required environment variables are passed to sudo by using sudo -E instead)

As noted above, these hooks do everything they can to ensure that the services are started and stopped so that the new configuration is applied cleanly. If for some reason the config just won't seem to apply (because the full set of services that need to be stopped / started are too difficult to enumerate), the node can always be rebooted (as a very last resort), at which point the config should now be in place.

Below are some examples of how one might run this in a production setting:

# Using ansible
- name: Apply a new MIG configuration
  environment:
      MIG_PARTED_DEBUG: false
      MIG_PARTED_HOOKS_FILE: /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.yaml
      MIG_PARTED_CONFIG_FILE: /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/config.yaml
      MIG_PARTED_SELECTED_CONFIG: all-1g.5gb
  command: /usr/bin/nvidia-mig-parted apply

# Using docker
docker run \
    --rm \
    --privileged \
    --ipc=host \
    --pid=host \
    -v /:/host \
    -e MIG_PARTED_DEBUG=false \
    -e MIG_PARTED_HOOKS_FILE=/etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.yaml \
    -e MIG_PARTED_CONFIG_FILE=/etc/nvidia-mig-manager/config.yaml \
    -e MIG_PARTED_SELECTED_CONFIG=all-1g.5gb \
    library/alpine \
    sh -c "exec chroot /host /usr/bin/nvidia-mig-parted apply"

# Using kubernetes
cat <<EOF | kubectl apply -f -
apiVersion: v1
kind: Pod
metadata:
  name: nvidia-mig-parted
spec:
  restartPolicy: Never
  hostPID: true
  hostIPC: true
  containers:
  - name: nvidia-mig-parted
    image: library/alpine
    imagePullPolicy: IfNotPresent
    env:
    - name: MIG_PARTED_DEBUG
      value: "false"
    - name: MIG_PARTED_HOOKS_FILE
      value: "/etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.yaml"
    - name: MIG_PARTED_CONFIG_FILE
      value: "/etc/nvidia-mig-manager/config.yaml"
    - name: MIG_PARTED_SELECTED_CONFIG
      value: "all-1g.5gb"
    command: ["sh", "-c", "exec chroot /host nvidia-mig-parted apply"]
    securityContext:
      privileged: true
    volumeMounts:
    - mountPath: /host
      name: host-root
  volumes:
  - name: host-root
    hostPath:
      path: "/"
      type: Directory
EOF

Switching MIG mode without the NVIDIA driver loaded

One important feature of nvidia-mig-parted is that it can toggle the MIG mode of a set of GPUs independent of partitioning them into a set of MIG devices.

For example, this can be done via calls to:

$ nvidia-mig-parted apply --mode-only -f examples/config.yaml -c all-disabled
$ nvidia-mig-parted apply --mode-only -f examples/config.yaml -c all-enabled
$ nvidia-mig-parted apply --mode-only -f examples/config.yaml -c custom-config
...

Note: As is the case with the regular use of apply, it may be required to explicitly specify the hooks file as /etc/nvidia-mig-manager/hooks.yaml or ensure that the MIG_PARTED_HOOKS_FILE environment variable is forwarded when executing the command with sudo by using sudo -E instead.

Under the hood, nvidia-mig-parted will scan the selected configuration and only apply the mig-enabled directive for each GPU (skipping configuration of the MIG devices specified).

A subsequent call without the --mode-only flag is then needed to trigger the MIG devices to actually get created.

Moreover, it is able to perform the MIG mode switch on a GPU without having the NVIDIA GPU driver loaded. This is important for several reasons, outlined below.

As described in the MIG user guide, enabling and disabling MIG mode is a heavy weight operation that (in all cases) requires a GPU reset and (in some cases) requires a full node reboot (i.e. when running in a VM with GPU passthrough). Moreover, it is not always possible to perform a GPU reset (even if it is technically allowed) because the NVIDIA driver will block the reset if there are any clients currently attached to the GPU. Depending on what software is installed along side the NVIDIA driver, enumerating these clients, disconnecting them, and reattaching them is often cumbersome (if not impossible) to do correctly.

Having the ability to change MIG mode without the driver installed, gives administrator's the flexibility to perform this switch without making any assumptions about the rest of the software stack running on the node.

For example, the MIG mode switch can be done very early on in the node boot process, before any other software comes online. Once the rest of the stack comes up, subsequent calls to nvidia-mig-parted can be made made that change the set of MIG devices that are present, but no longer require a MIG mode switch or a GPU reset.

In other scenarios (most notably in the cloud), it may be desirable to "pre-enable" MIG for GPUs attached to nodes that have no GPU driver installed in their base OS. In such a scenario, something like Amazon's cloud-config or GCP's cloud-init script can be used to ensure MIG mode is configured as desired (and perform a node reboot if necessary). Once the node is up, the user can then install the nvidia-driver themselves and proceed with configuring any MIG devices.