Setting up Intel Device Plugins Operator

Overview

Intel Device Plugins are utilized to advertise Intel hardware features (resources) to a Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform (RHOCP) Cluster. This allows workloads running on pods deployed within the clusters to leverage these features. To handle the deployment and lifecycle of these device plugins, the Intel Device Plugins Operator is used. The Intel Device Plugins container images and operator have been officially certified and published on the Red Hat Ecosystem Catalog. For more details on the upstream project, please refer to Intel Device Plugins for Kubernetes.

Prerequisities

  • Provisioned RHOCP cluster. Follow steps here.

  • Setup Node Feature Discovery (NFD). Follow steps here.

  • Follow the additional prerequisites for provisioning Intel® Data Center GPU:

    • Setup out of tree drivers for Intel Data Center GPU provisioning. Follow the steps listed here.

  • Follow the additional prerequisites for provisioning Intel® QuickAssist Technology:

    • Configure MCO for provisioning Intel QAT. Follow steps here.

Install Intel Device Plugins Operator on Red Hat OpenShift

Installation via web console

Follow the steps below to install Intel Device Plugins Operator using OpenShift web console:

  1. In the OpenShift web console, navigate to Operator -> OperatorHub.

  2. Search for Intel Device Plugins Operator in all items field -> Click Install.

Verify Installation via web console

  1. Go to Operator -> Installed Operators.

  2. Verify that the status of the operator is Succeeded.

Installation via command line interface (CLI)

Apply the install_operator.yaml file:

$ oc apply -f https://raw.githubusercontent.com/intel/intel-technology-enabling-for-openshift/main/device_plugins/install_operator.yaml

Verify Installation via CLI

Verify that the operator controller manager pod is up and running:

$ oc get pod | grep inteldeviceplugins-controller-manager

inteldeviceplugins-controller-manager-6b8c76c867-hftqm   2/2     Running   0          17m

Resources Provided by Intel Device Plugins

The resources are the user interface for customers to claim and consume the hardware features provided by Intel Device Plugins from the user pods. See below table for the details:

Feature

Resources

Description

Usage

Intel® SGX

sgx.intel.com/epc

Intel SGX EPC memory for user pod to claim

Link

Intel® Data Center GPU Flex Series
Intel® Data Center GPU Max Series

gpu.intel.com/i915

Intel Data Center GPU Card for user pod to claim

Link

Intel® QAT

qat.intel.com/cy
qat.intel.com/dc

cy: Intel QAT VFIO Virtual Function device configured for cryptography for user pod to claim
dc: Intel QAT VFIO Virtual Function device configured for cryptography for user pod to claim

Link
Link

Intel® DSA

dsa.intel.com/wq-user-shared
dsa.intel.com/wq-user-dedicated

Intel DSA Work Queue for user pod to claim

Link

Creating Intel Device Plugin custom resource (CR)

  • To create an Intel SGX device plugin CR, follow this link.

  • To create an Intel GPU device plugin CR, follow this link.

  • To create an Intel QAT device plugin CR, follow this link.

  • To create an Intel DSA device plugin CR, follow this link.