DRA Driver for NVIDIA GPUs Overview on DRA Driver for NVIDIA GPUs

Prerequisites

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Cluster, software, and hardware requirements for the DRA Driver for NVIDIA GPUs.

Tip: Most of these prerequisites can be installed and managed for you by the NVIDIA GPU Operator.

Requirement	Version / Notes
Kubernetes	v1.34.2 or later, with at least one node that has one or more NVIDIA GPUs. The use of DRA became GA in Kubernetes v1.34+ and earlier versions required the `DynamicResourceAllocation` feature gate.
Helm	v3.8 or later.
NVIDIA Driver	v565 or later for GPU allocation. v570.158.01 or later if using ComputeDomains.
CDI	Enabled in your container runtime. This is enabled by default in containerd 2.0+ and CRIO v1.27+. The DRA Driver uses CDI to expose GPUs to containers.
Node Feature Discovery (NFD)	Labels GPU nodes in the cluster. The DRA Driver uses these labels to target the GPU kubelet plugin to the correct nodes.

ComputeDomains additional prerequisites

If you plan to use ComputeDomains, you also need:

Install the driver

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Install the DRA Driver for NVIDIA GPUs and validate that GPU or ComputeDomain allocation is working on your cluster.

Before you begin:

Confirm all prerequisites are met.
If you have the NVIDIA GPU Operator installed, follow the GPU Operator install guide instead.

Install the chart

The following command installs the DRA Driver with both GPU allocation and ComputeDomain support enabled.

By default, both resource plugins are enabled. If you only need one, the other can be left enabled with no impact on the cluster, or you can disable it explicitly:

Upgrade

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Upgrade the DRA Driver for NVIDIA GPUs from v25.12.0 to v0.4.0 without disrupting existing workloads. For the full release summary, see the v0.4.0 release notes.

What changed

The v0.4.0 release introduces several changes that affect how this upgrade is performed:

The project moved from NVIDIA/k8s-dra-driver-gpu to kubernetes-sigs/dra-driver-nvidia-gpu. The Go module is now sigs.k8s.io/nvidia-dra-driver-gpu and container images are published to registry.k8s.io/dra-driver-nvidia/dra-driver-nvidia-gpu in addition to NVIDIA NGC Catalog (NGC).
The Helm chart name changed from nvidia-dra-driver-gpu to dra-driver-nvidia-gpu. To keep existing Kubernetes resource names (DaemonSets, Deployments, ServiceAccounts, RBAC) stable, --set nameOverride=nvidia-dra-driver-gpu is required on the first upgrade. See Upgrade procedure below.
In addition to NGC (nvidia/dra-driver-nvidia-gpu), the DRA Driver Helm chart is now also published to oci://registry.k8s.io/dra-driver-nvidia/charts/dra-driver-nvidia-gpu. You can continue to use the NGC chart or switch to the Kubernetes registry.
Starting in v0.4.0, the chart follows SemVer and --version 0.4.0 is required on helm install and helm upgrade.
Once the cluster is on v0.4.0, downgrading to v25.12.0 is not supported. Two changes prevent downgrade: the kubelet plugin checkpoint format added a BootID field, and the ComputeDomain API now allows numNodes to be omitted. Plan this upgrade as forward-only. See the v0.4.0 release notes for more details.

Before you begin

Collect the --set flags you used at install time (for example, gpuResourcesEnabledOverride, nvidiaDriverRoot, webhook.enabled). You will pass the same flags on helm upgrade.
If any node hit the “device cannot be reprepared after host reboot” issue (#951) prior to v0.4.0, remove the kubelet plugin checkpoint file on that node before upgrading. The new BootID-aware checkpoint format in v0.4.0 only invalidates checkpoints that already carry a recorded BootID; legacy checkpoints written by v25.12.0 are otherwise assumed valid.

Upgrade procedure

Perform the following steps in order.