Prover Packaging
Prover packaging on Firestarter works by converting container image into a Linux-based VM image. Any program that can run in a container, can run on Firestarter.
Prerequisites
Linux as a host machine
sudo
rights (needed for disk image loopback mounts)Install
gvltctl
from releasesInstall following programs from your distributions package manager:
Ubuntu:
build-essentials
Fedora:
gcc
make
libtool
objtool
flex
bison
kernel-devel
git
podman
skopeo
syslinux
extlinux
Runtime environment
The VM image contains the Linux kernel, Firestarter-specific init, and the container image file tree that is passed for the gvltctl build
command.
All the input files are mounted read-only under /mnt/gevulot/input
which is the only allowed location for files passed in Task
inputContexts
.
All the output files are mounted read-write under /mnt/gevulot/output
which is the only writable location for files that are specified in Task
outputContexts
.
Package CPU-only prover
The first step is to ensure that the prover either has a pre-built container image or a working Containerfile/Dockerfile that can be used to build the container image.
Container image
Once the prover works in the container, then it can be packaged into a VM image:
gvltctl build --container containers-storage:localhost/my_prover:latest -s 250M -o prover.img
That command uses container image build with podman locally and packages it into a VM image with 250MB disk.
Containerfile
Building a VM image from a Containerfile works similarly:
gvltctl build --containerfile Containerfile -s 250M -o prover.img
Package GPU accelerated prover
NOTE: For now, only nVidia GPUs are supported.
The GPU-accelerated prover packaging is nearly the same as CPU-only, but there are a couple of additional requirements:
The source container must have all nVidia runtime libraries present. This is easiest to achieve by using the official
docker.io/nvidia/cuda
as the base image. As of writing, the latest runtime tag is12.6.2-runtime-ubuntu24.04
--nvidia-drivers
argument specified forgvltctl build
- this will build nVidia GPU drivers to the VM image, matching the installed kernel
Building the VM image is simple:
gvltctl build --container containers-storage:localhost/my_gpu_prover:latest --nvidia-drivers -s 2G -o gpu_prover.img
fo
Advanced options for VM image
The gvltctl build
provides flexible options for customizing the VM image if advanced tuning is needed for some reason. This is not advisable, however, unless you really know what you are doing.
For further information: Refer to gvltctl build --help
and respective source code for gvltctl and mia.
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