Building Kernel Modules on Atomic with Podman

The goal of this post is to explain how to build and load a kernel module inside a container using Podman.

Building and using third party kernel modules on Atomic is a challenging task. There are a handful of methods for supporting kernel modules on a Linux system such as kmods, akmods, DKMS, and manually building them by hand. Digging into all of the technical hurdles Atomic faces with each method is a very large topic and a bit out of scope for this blog post, so we will focus on DKMS for the time being.

Using DKMS on Atomic does not work as expected. This means using popular third party kernel modules such as NVidia drivers, VirtualBox, and WireGuard via their supported install methods will not work as a result, but I will explain how we can work around these limitations in this blog post.

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