Developer guide

Table of contents

  1. Building from source
    1. Download the source code
    2. Docker build
    3. Docker multi-arch builds with buildx
    4. Deployment
    5. Building locally
    6. Customizing the build
    7. Testing
  2. Running locally
    1. NFD-Master
    2. NFD-Worker
    3. NFD-Topology-Updater
  3. Running with Tilt
    1. Prerequisites
    2. Environment variables
  4. Documentation

Building from source

Download the source code

git clone https://github.com/kubernetes-sigs/node-feature-discovery
cd node-feature-discovery

Docker build

Build the container image

See customizing the build below for altering the container image registry, for example.

make

Push the container image

Optional, this example with Docker.

docker push <IMAGE_TAG>

Docker multi-arch builds with buildx

The default set of architectures enabled for mulit-arch builds are linux/amd64 and linux/arm64. If more architectures are needed one can override the IMAGE_ALL_PLATFORMS variable with a comma separated list of OS/ARCH tuples.

Build the manifest-list with a container image per arch

make image-all

Currently docker does not support loading of manifest-lists meaning the images are not shown when executing docker images, see: buildx issue #59.

Push the manifest-list with container image per arch

make push-all

The resulting container image can be used in the same way on each arch by pulling e.g. node-feature-discovery:master without specifying the architecture. The manifest-list will take care of providing the right architecture image.

Change the job spec to use your custom image (optional)

To use your published image from the step above instead of the registry.k8s.io/nfd/node-feature-discovery image, edit image attribute in the spec template(s) to the new location (<registry-name>/<image-name>[:<version>]).

Deployment

The yamls makefile generates a kustomization.yaml matching your locally built image and using the deploy/overlays/default deployment. See build customization below for configurability, e.g. changing the deployment namespace.

K8S_NAMESPACE=my-ns make yamls
kubectl apply -k .

You can use alternative deployment methods by modifying the auto-generated kustomization file.

Building locally

You can also build the binaries locally

make build

This will compile binaries under bin/

Customizing the build

There are several Makefile variables that control the build process and the name of the resulting container image. The following are targeted targeted for build customization and they can be specified via environment variables or makefile overrides.

Variable Description Default value
HOSTMOUNT_PREFIX Prefix of system directories for feature discovery (local builds) / (local builds) /host- (container builds)
IMAGE_BUILD_CMD Command to build the image docker build
IMAGE_BUILD_EXTRA_OPTS Extra options to pass to build command empty
IMAGE_BUILDX_CMD Command to build and push multi-arch images with buildx DOCKER_CLI_EXPERIMENTAL=enabled docker buildx build –platform=${IMAGE_ALL_PLATFORMS} –progress=auto –pull
IMAGE_ALL_PLATFORMS Comma separated list of OS/ARCH tuples for mulit-arch builds linux/amd64,linux/arm64
IMAGE_PUSH_CMD Command to push the image to remote registry docker push
IMAGE_REGISTRY Container image registry to use registry.k8s.io/nfd
IMAGE_TAG_NAME Container image tag name <nfd version>
IMAGE_EXTRA_TAG_NAMES Additional container image tag(s) to create when building image empty
K8S_NAMESPACE nfd-master and nfd-worker namespace node-feature-discovery

For example, to use a custom registry:

make IMAGE_REGISTRY=<my custom registry uri>

Or to specify a build tool different from Docker, It can be done in 2 ways:

  1. via environment

     IMAGE_BUILD_CMD="buildah bud" make

  2. by overriding the variable value

     make  IMAGE_BUILD_CMD="buildah bud"

Testing

Unit tests are automatically run as part of the container image build. You can also run them manually in the source code tree by running:

make test

End-to-end tests are built on top of the e2e test framework of Kubernetes, and, they required a cluster to run them on. For running the tests on your test cluster you need to specify the kubeconfig to be used:

make e2e-test KUBECONFIG=$HOME/.kube/config

There are several environment variables that can be used to customize the e2e-tests:

Variable Description Default value
KUBECONFIG Kubeconfig for running e2e-tests empty
E2E_TEST_CONFIG Parameterization file of e2e-tests (see example) empty
E2E_PULL_IF_NOT_PRESENT True-ish value makes the image pull policy IfNotPresent (to be used only in e2e tests) false
E2E_TEST_FULL_IMAGE Run e2e-test also against the Full Image tag false
E2E_GINKGO_LABEL_FILTER Ginkgo label filter to use for running e2e tests empty
OPENSHIFT Non-empty value enables OpenShift specific support (only affects e2e tests) empty

Running locally

**DEPRECATED: Running NFD locally is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. It depends on the gRPC API which is deprecated and will be removed in a future release. To run NFD locally, disable the NodeFeature API with -feature-gates NodeFeatureAPI=false flag.

You can run NFD locally, either directly on your host OS or in containers for testing and development purposes. This may be useful e.g. for checking features-detection.

NFD-Master

When running as a standalone container labeling is expected to fail because Kubernetes API is not available. Thus, it is recommended to use -no-publish Also specify -crd-controller=false and -feature-gates NodeFeatureAPI=false command line flags to disable CRD controller and enable gRPC. E.g.

$ export NFD_CONTAINER_IMAGE=gcr.io/k8s-staging-nfd/node-feature-discovery:master
$ docker run --rm --name=nfd-test ${NFD_CONTAINER_IMAGE} nfd-master -no-publish -crd-controller=false -feature-gates NodeFeatureAPI=false
2019/02/01 14:48:21 Node Feature Discovery Master <NFD_VERSION>
2019/02/01 14:48:21 gRPC server serving on port: 8080

NFD-Worker

To run nfd-worker as a "stand-alone" container you need to run it in the same network namespace as the nfd-master container:

$ docker run --rm --network=container:nfd-test ${NFD_CONTAINER_IMAGE} nfd-worker -feature-gates NodeFeatureAPI=false
2019/02/01 14:48:56 Node Feature Discovery Worker <NFD_VERSION>
...

If you just want to try out feature discovery without connecting to nfd-master, pass the -no-publish flag to nfd-worker.

NOTE: Some feature sources need certain directories and/or files from the host mounted inside the NFD container. Thus, you need to provide Docker with the correct --volume options for them to work correctly when run stand-alone directly with docker run. See the default deployment for up-to-date information about the required volume mounts.

NFD-Topology-Updater

To run nfd-topology-updater as a "stand-alone" container you need to run it in with the -no-publish flag to disable communication to the Kubernetes apiserver.

$ docker run --rm ${NFD_CONTAINER_IMAGE} nfd-topology-updater -no-publish
2019/02/01 14:48:56 Node Feature Discovery Topology Updater <NFD_VERSION>
...

If you just want to try out resource topology discovery without connecting to the Kubernetes API, pass the -no-publish flag to nfd-topology-updater.

NOTE: NFD topology updater needs certain directories and/or files from the host mounted inside the NFD container. Thus, you need to provide Docker with the correct --volume options for them to work correctly when run stand-alone directly with docker run. See the template spec for up-to-date information about the required volume mounts.

PodResource API is a prerequisite for nfd-topology-updater. Preceding Kubernetes v1.23, the kubelet must be started with the following flag: --feature-gates=KubeletPodResourcesGetAllocatable=true. Starting Kubernetes v1.23, the GetAllocatableResources is enabled by default through KubeletPodResourcesGetAllocatable feature gate.

Running with Tilt

Another option for building NFD locally is via Tilt tool, which can build container images, push them to a local registry and reload your Kubernetes pods automatically. When using Tilt, you don't have to build container images and re-deploy your pods manually but instead let the Tilt take care of it. Tiltfile is a configuration file for the Tilt and is located at the root directory. To develop NFD with Tilt, follow the steps below.

Prerequisites

  1. Install Docker
  2. Setup Docker as a non-root user.
  3. Install kubectl
  4. Install kustomize
  5. Install tilt
  6. Create a local Kubernetes cluster

To start up your Tilt development environment, run

tilt up

at the root of your local NFD codebase. Tilt will start a web interface in the localhost and port 10350. From the web interface, you are able to see how NFD worker and master are progressing, watch their build and runtime logs. Once your code changes are saved locally, Tilt will notice it and re-build the container image from the current code, push the image to the registry and re-deploy NFD pods with the latest container image.

Environment variables

To override environment variables used in the Tiltfile during image build, export them in your current terminal before starting Tilt.

export IMAGE_TAG_NAME="v1"
tilt up

This will override the default value(master) of IMAGE_TAG_NAME variable defined in the Tiltfile.

Documentation

All documentation resides under the docs directory in the source tree. It is designed to be served as a html site by GitHub Pages.

Building the documentation is containerized to fix the build environment. The recommended way for developing documentation is to run:

make site-serve

This will build the documentation in a container and serve it under localhost:4000/ making it easy to verify the results. Any changes made to the docs/ will automatically re-trigger a rebuild and are reflected in the served content and can be inspected with a browser refresh.

To just build the html documentation run:

make site-build

This will generate html documentation under docs/_site/.