NVIDIA Container Toolkit¶

Configure Proxmox VE nodes to pass NVIDIA GPUs through to LXC containers.

1. Install the NVIDIA Driver¶

Install from Debian's official repositories. On Proxmox VE (Debian-based), non-free-firmware must be enabled.

# Ensure non-free sources are available
apt update
apt install -y nvidia-driver

If the packaged version is too old for your GPU, install from Debian backports:

apt install -y -t bookworm-backports nvidia-driver

Reboot after installation and verify with nvidia-smi.

2. Install the NVIDIA Container Toolkit¶

Follow the official NVIDIA installation guide for your distribution:

👉 NVIDIA Container Toolkit — Install Guide

The short version for Debian/Ubuntu:

curl -fsSL https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/gpgkey \
  | gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg

curl -s -L https://nvidia.github.io/libnvidia-container/stable/deb/nvidia-container-toolkit.list \
  | sed 's#deb https://#deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/nvidia-container-toolkit-keyring.gpg] https://#g' \
  | tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/nvidia-container-toolkit.list

apt update
apt install -y nvidia-container-toolkit

3. Create the Hookscript Symlink¶

The application passes GPU access to containers via an LXC hookscript. Proxmox stores snippets in /var/lib/vz/snippets/, but the hook file is installed to /usr/share/lxc/hooks/nvidia by the lxc-common package (installed automatically as a dependency). Create a symlink so Proxmox can find it:

mkdir -p /var/lib/vz/snippets
ln -sf /usr/share/lxc/hooks/nvidia /var/lib/vz/snippets/nvidia

Verify the symlink:

ls -la /var/lib/vz/snippets/nvidia
# Should show: /var/lib/vz/snippets/nvidia -> /usr/share/lxc/hooks/nvidia

4. Mark the Node as NVIDIA-Capable¶

After completing the host-level setup, mark the node as NVIDIA-capable in the application:

1. Navigate to Nodes → select the node
2. Enable the NVIDIA Available flag
3. Save

Users will then be able to request NVIDIA GPU access when creating containers on this site.