Chapter 1. About specialized hardware and driver enablement
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.
