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NVIDIA Multi-Generational Acceleration Stacks

To prevent driver incompatibilities, symbol conflicts, and runtime panics across disparate GPU microarchitectures, imago segments NVIDIA support into four distinct hardware generations plus a dedicated datacenter tier.

All modern and bleeding flavors generate native Container Device Interface (CDI) specifications at /etc/cdi/nvidia.yaml, providing seamless device pass-through across Docker, Podman, and containerd without wrapper runtimes.

1. NVIDIA Legacy (*-nvidia-legacy)

  • Microarchitectures: Pascal (sm_60, sm_61) and Volta (sm_70).
  • Target GPUs: GTX 1070/1080/1080Ti, Tesla P4, P40, P100, Titan Xp, Tesla V100.
  • Driver & CUDA: NVIDIA 580 headless branch (580) with CUDA 13.0.
  • Why this exists: The 580 branch is the last NVIDIA driver branch that supports Maxwell, Pascal and Volta; newer branches drop them. The driver exposes the CUDA 13.0 runtime, but CUDA Toolkit 13.0 removed offline compilation and library support for these architectures, so workloads ship containers built with a CUDA 12.x toolkit, which run on this driver.

2. NVIDIA Mainstream (*-nvidia-mainstream / *-nvidia)

  • Microarchitectures: Turing (sm_75) and Ampere (sm_80, sm_86).
  • Target GPUs: RTX 20/30 series, Tesla T4, A100, A10, A30, L4, RTX A6000.
  • Driver & CUDA: NVIDIA 595 headless branch (595) with CUDA 13.2.
  • Container Device Interface: Modern CDI v0.6+ specifications generated at /etc/cdi/nvidia.yaml.

3. NVIDIA Modern (*-nvidia-modern)

  • Microarchitectures: Ada Lovelace (sm_89) and Hopper (sm_90).
  • Target GPUs: RTX 4080/4090, RTX 6000 Ada, L40, L40S, H100 PCIe.
  • Driver & CUDA: NVIDIA 615 branch (615) with CUDA 13.4.
  • Container Device Interface: Native CDI specifications generated at /etc/cdi/nvidia.yaml.
  • Features: Ada FP8 Tensor Cores, modern Transformer Engine support, optical flow acceleration.

4. NVIDIA Bleeding-Edge (*-nvidia-bleeding)

  • Microarchitectures: Blackwell (sm_100, sm_120).
  • Target GPUs: GeForce RTX 5080/5090, B100, B200, GB200 NVL.
  • Driver & CUDA: NVIDIA 615 branch (615) with CUDA 13.4.
  • Features: Blackwell 2nd-gen Transformer Engine, native NVLink-C2C, micro-scaling formats (MXFP4/MXFP6/MXFP8), cutting-edge kernel support on Ubuntu 26.04.

5. NVIDIA Datacenter (*-nvidia-datacenter)

  • Microarchitectures: Hopper (sm_90) and Blackwell (sm_100).
  • Target GPUs: H100, H200, B100, B200, GB200 Superchip clusters.
  • Open Kernel Modules: Installs the Ubuntu server open kernel modules (nvidia-headless-615-server-open, nvidia-utils-615-server).
  • Fabric Manager: Pre-configures and automatically enables nvidia-fabricmanager-615 for full-mesh NVLink and NVSwitch multi-GPU scaling.
  • GPUDirect Storage (GDS): Pre-configured with RDMA, NVMe-oF, and peer-to-peer DMA hooks.

Pinned packages and their check

Every branch and CUDA label comes from drivers.nvidia in versions.json; the provisioners stop with an error when a pin is missing instead of falling back to a built-in branch.

Tier Driver key Packages CUDA key
legacy legacy_driver (580) nvidia-headless-580, nvidia-utils-580 cuda_legacy (13.0)
mainstream mainstream_driver (595) nvidia-headless-595, nvidia-utils-595 cuda_mainstream (13.2)
modern modern_driver (615) nvidia-headless-615-open, nvidia-utils-615 cuda_modern (13.4)
bleeding bleeding_driver (615) nvidia-headless-615-open, nvidia-utils-615 cuda_bleeding (13.4)
datacenter datacenter_driver (615) nvidia-headless-615-server-open, nvidia-utils-615-server, nvidia-fabricmanager-615 none

Modern and bleeding share the 615 branch: the archive carries 610 only as transitional packages that install 615.

tools/ci/upstream_sources.py check runs before the Packer build in release-matrix.yml. For each tier it reads the Ubuntu 26.04 Packages index and fails when a package is absent or transitional (section oldlibs, or a single dependency on the same package at another branch). It also fails when the CUDA label has no cuda-compat-<major>-<minor> package in NVIDIA's ubuntu2404 repository, or when that package depends on a different driver branch:

python3 -I tools/ci/upstream_sources.py check   # exit 1 names each missing source