Earlier if the NVIDIA driver was not installed when cAdvisor was started
we would start a goroutine to try to initialize NVML every minute.
This resulted in a race. We can have a situation where:
- goroutine tries to initialize NVML but fails. So, it sleeps for a minute.
- the driver is installed.
- a container that uses NVIDIA devices is started.
This container would not get GPU stats because a minute has not passed
since the last failed initialization attempt and so NVML is not
initialized.
When cAdvisor starts up, it would read the `vendor` files in
`/sys/bus/pci/devices/*` to see if any NVIDIA devices (vendor ID: 0x10de) are
attached to the node. If no NVIDIA devices are found, this code path would
become dormant for the rest of cAdvisor lifetime. If NVIDIA devices are found,
we would start a goroutine that would check for the presence of NVML by trying
to dynamically load it at regular intervals. We need to do this regular
checking instead of doing it just once because it may happen that cAdvisor is
started before the NVIDIA drivers and NVML are installed. Once the NVML
dynamic loading succeeds, we would use NVML’s query methods to find out how
many devices exist on the node and create a map from their minor numbers to
their handles and cache that map. The goroutine would exit at this point.
If we detected the presence of NVML in the previous step, whenever a new
container is detected by cAdvisor, cAdvisor would read the `devices.list` file
from the container's devices cgroup. The `devices.list` file lists the
major:minor number of all the devices that the container is allowed to access.
If we find any device with major number 195 (which is the major number assigned
to NVIDIA devices), we would cache the list of corresponding minor numbers for
that container.
During every housekeeping operation, in addition to collecting all the existing
metrics, we will use the cached NVIDIA device minor numbers and the map from
minor numbers to device handles to get metrics for GPU devices attached to the
container.
