Docker build with nvidia runtime

Gaming and Visualization Technologies General Topics and Other SDKs
1

I have a GPU application that does unit-testing during the image building stage. With Docker 19.03, one can specify nvidia runtime with docker run --gpus all but I also need access to the gpus for docker build because I do unit-testing. How can I achieve this goal?

For older version of docker that use nvidia-docker2 it was not possible to specifiy runtime during build stage, BUT you can set the default runtime to be nvidia, and docker build works fine that way. Can I do that in Docker 19.03 that doesn’t need nvidia-docker anymore? If so, how?

2

A “solution” I found is to first run a base image with the host nvidia drivers mounted on it

docker run -it --rm --gpus ubuntu

And then build my app within the container manually and commit the resulting image. This is not ideal and it would be best to have access to nvidia-smi during the build phase.