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 Fedora CoreOS (FCOS) 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 OKD cluster, OKD offers several tools:

• The Driver Toolkit is a container image that is a part of every OKD 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 OKD.

• 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.