project-nomad/admin/app
Chris Sherwood 9b90fcf9e8 fix(gpu): a missing /dev/kfd blocks the AI Assistant install entirely
When an AMD GPU is detected, the install switches to the ROCm image and passes
/dev/kfd and /dev/dri into the container. _discoverAMDDevices() returns both
unconditionally, with no check that they exist. Detection reads PCI data, which
says nothing about whether the ROCm kernel interface was ever loaded, so on a
pre-ROCm card or a host without amdgpu the container is rejected:

    (HTTP code 500) server error - error gathering device information while
    adding custom device "/dev/kfd": no such file or directory

and the install dies. There is an opt-out, ai.amdGpuAcceleration, but it is a
backend-only KV key with no settings toggle, no route and no UI, so an affected
user cannot install the AI Assistant at all through the interface even though
CPU-only would work fine on their machine.

Fall back to the CPU image instead, with a message explaining why.

Two things about the shape of this fix, both measured rather than assumed:

- It hooks start(), not createContainer(). The daemon accepts a container whose
  --device path does not exist and only resolves devices on start. Verified
  against Docker 29.6.2 over the socket: create returns 201, start returns 500
  with the message above.

- It retries rather than pre-checking. The admin runs in its own container, so
  stat()ing /dev/kfd describes the admin's namespace, not the host's. Verified
  on NOMAD6, a working ROCm box (Ollama running ollama/ollama:rocm with both
  devices attached): /dev/kfd is PRESENT on the host and ABSENT inside the admin
  container. A pre-check would therefore have stripped GPU passthrough from a
  machine where AMD acceleration works.

The matcher keys on the device-gathering phrase rather than a bare "no such file
or directory", which Docker also emits for missing bind-mount sources; falling
back to CPU on one of those would hide a real failure behind a degraded install.
Checked against all three formats the daemon/dockerode produce, and against a
port-conflict message, to confirm it discriminates.

The success path is unchanged: the create payload is built by one helper used by
both attempts, and the fallback only runs after a start() failure that matches.

Fixes #1232

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LtGWCVMPYn6qPWVYiycK74
2026-09-29 15:54:41 -07:00
..
controllers feat(AI): let retrieval decline instead of making the prompt paper over it 2026-09-29 15:54:41 -07:00
data refactor(drug-reference): make collections JSON the single source for curated data (#1130) 2026-08-04 03:38:35 +00:00
exceptions fix(Docs): documentation renderer fixes 2025-12-23 16:00:33 -08:00
jobs fix(queue): clear terminal jobs before re-dispatch so downloads aren't silently dropped 2026-09-29 15:54:41 -07:00
middleware fix(API): skip compression for Server-Sent Events (#798) 2026-05-20 10:16:00 -07:00
models feat(benchmark): official multi-arch sysbench, resolved digest, platform metadata (#1158) 2026-08-04 03:39:53 +00:00
services fix(gpu): a missing /dev/kfd blocks the AI Assistant install entirely 2026-09-29 15:54:41 -07:00
utils fix(queue): stop stalled-job recovery forking the embedding chain 2026-09-29 15:54:41 -07:00
validators feat(AI): let retrieval decline instead of making the prompt paper over it 2026-09-29 15:54:41 -07:00