Deploying Across Heterogeneous Accelerators at the Edge in Kubernetes
In the last article we introduced the use of devicetree-derived node labels for labelling static features of Edge Gateways but observed that this was not a complete labelling solution given its lack of support for the identification and labelling of devices attached to enumerable busses, such as PCI or USB.
Fortunately, there’s another project that has, at least partially, taken care of this — the Kubernetesnode-feature-discovery (NFD) project. I say partially as it took care of PCI, but we had to write the USB support ourselves. USB support has now been merged for the next release. We take a closer look at NFD below.
NFD Overview
NFD is, as the name implies, a tool for carrying out node feature discovery across Kubernetes clusters. It accomplishes this by carrying out hardware detection and the extraction of OS configuration information on a per-node basis and communicating these results to the master for labelling.
NFD itself is comprised of two different components:
nfd-masteris the component responsible for carrying out node labellingnfd-workeris the component responsible for carrying out the feature detection and communicating the findings to thenfd-master.
