Customizing NVIDIA GPU Driver Parameters during Installation

The NVIDIA Driver kernel modules accept a number of parameters which can be used to customize the behavior of the driver. By default, the GPU Operator loads the kernel modules with default values. On a machine with the driver already installed, you can list the parameter names and values with the cat /proc/driver/nvidia/params command. You can pass custom parameters to the kernel modules that get loaded as part of the NVIDIA Driver installation (nvidia, nvidia-modeset, nvidia-uvm, and nvidia-peermem).

To pass custom parameters, execute the following steps.

Create a configuration file named <module>.conf, where <module> is the name of the kernel module the parameters are for. The file should contain parameters as key-value pairs – one parameter per line. In the following example, the GPU firmware logging parameter is passed to the nvidia module.

$ cat nvidia.conf
NVreg_EnableGpuFirmwareLogs=2

Create a ConfigMap for the configuration file. If multiple modules are being configured, pass multiple files when creating the ConfigMap.

$ kubectl create configmap kernel-module-params -n gpu-operator --from-file=nvidia.conf=./nvidia.conf

Install the GPU Operator and set driver.kernelModuleConfig.name to the name of the ConfigMap containing the kernel module parameters.

$ helm install --wait --generate-name \
     -n gpu-operator --create-namespace \
     nvidia/gpu-operator \
     --version=v24.9.0 \
     --set driver.kernelModuleConfig.name="kernel-module-params"