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Intel GPU Plugin

Kubernetes device plugin that exposes Intel GPU resources to pods.

About

The Intel GPU Plugin is part of Intel's Device Plugins for Kubernetes. It runs as a DaemonSet and registers Intel integrated and discrete GPU devices (gpu.intel.com/i915 and related resources) with the kubelet device plugin API, making them requestable in pod specs. It is used in this cluster to enable hardware-accelerated transcoding and compute workloads (e.g. Jellyfin) on nodes with Intel iGPUs.

Installation

Architecture

Raw DaemonSet manifest (no HelmRelease, no Helm chart). Image: intel/intel-gpu-plugin:0.35.0 (digest-pinned: sha256:34697f9c28...). Deployed in kube-system namespace. Targets amd64 nodes via nodeSelector. Mounts /dev/dri, /sys/class/drm (read-only), /var/lib/kubelet/device-plugins, and /var/run/cdi. Rolling update strategy with maxUnavailable: 1.

Security

Container securityContext: allowPrivilegeEscalation: false, capabilities: drop: ALL, readOnlyRootFilesystem: true, seccompProfile: RuntimeDefault. The plugin needs host device access (/dev/dri) but drops all capabilities. No cluster-wide RBAC required — device plugins use the kubelet gRPC socket directly.

Updates

Managed by Renovate. Image is digest-pinned (sha256:34697f9c286857da986381595ac2a693524a83c831955247dae47dfda4d2f526).

Administration

Usage

Pods request Intel GPU resources by adding resources.limits: gpu.intel.com/i915: "1" (or the appropriate resource name) to their container spec. The device plugin makes /dev/dri device nodes available inside the container. Media transcoding applications like Jellyfin use this to offload video encode/decode to the Intel iGPU.

Metadata

Kubernetes Metadata
  • Image: intel/intel-gpu-plugin:0.35.0@sha256:34697f9c286857da986381595ac2a693524a83c831955247dae47dfda4d2f526