Universal Core is a Universal Blue custom image of Fedora CoreOS.
While Universal Blue has been receiving much attention on the desktop; Universal Core (ucore) has been quietly growing its own set of features for the server side of things.
Announcing NVIDIA Support¶
Today we get to announce a long awaited feature: ucore finally has images available with NVIDIA drivers built in!
As one of our oldest feature requests, which also happend to be created on April 1st, some probably wondered if it was an April Fools Day joke. But no, 6 months later, the feature has landed.
NVIDIA for a Homelab¶
What could this feature provide a CoreOS/ucore user with an NVIDIA card?
Typically its going to be one of:
- CUDA for AI, or other GPU accelerated workloads
- transcoding video, especially useful for users lacking newer Intel GPUs with QuickSync
FrigateNVR is a great example of a self-hostable open source project which can use both video transcode capabilities and compute capabilities to power a smart home camera solution.
Details¶
What’s actually included with this “NVIDIA feature”?
- nvidia kernel driver
- We pre-build the latest nvidia driver (kmod) from negativo17’s fedora-nvidia repository.
- This upstream was chosen over rpmfusion due to its granular packaging concept which allows the installation of only minimal
nvidia-driver-cudapackages and does NOT require xorg/wayland/etc as dependencies.
- nvidia-container-toolkit
- CoreOS is focussed on container workloads, and to use NVIDIA on containers, you need their toolkit.
- The latest version is installed here which simultaneously supports bot
