GKE node with modprobe

7/8/2019

Is there a way to load any kernel module ("modprobe nfsd" in my case) automatically after starting/upgrading nodes or in GKE? We are running an NFS server pod on our kubernetes cluster and it dies after every GKE upgrade

Tried both cos and ubuntu images, none of them seems to have nfsd loaded by default.

Also tried something like this, but it seems it does not do what it is supposed to do:

kind: DaemonSet
apiVersion: extensions/v1beta1
metadata:
  name: nfsd-modprobe
  labels:
    app: nfsd-modprobe
spec:
  template:
    metadata:
      labels:
        app: nfsd-modprobe
    spec:
      hostPID: true
      containers:
        - name: nfsd-modprobe
          image: gcr.io/google-containers/startup-script:v1
          imagePullPolicy: Always
          securityContext:
            privileged: true
          env:
          - name: STARTUP_SCRIPT
            value: |
              #! /bin/bash

              modprobe nfs
              modprobe nfsd
              while true; do sleep 1; done
-- Palko
google-kubernetes-engine
kubernetes

1 Answer

7/8/2019

By default, you cannot load modules from inside a container because excluding kernel components is one of the main reason containers are lightweight and portable. You need to load the module from the host OS in order to make it available inside the container. This means you could simply launch a script that enables the kernel modules you want after each GKE upgrade.

However, there exists a somewhat hacky way to load kernel modules from inside a docker container. It all boils down to launching your container with escalated privileges and with access to certain host directories. You should try that if you really want to mount your kernel modules while inside a container.

-- Alassane Ndiaye
Source: StackOverflow