DevOps Operations Practice

Oct 12, 2026 · Operations

Ubuntu Auto-Update Breaks NVIDIA Drivers: Fixing nvidia-smi & K8s GPU Plugin Failures

After Ubuntu's unattended-upgrades silently upgraded the kernel overnight, NVIDIA kernel modules vanished, causing nvidia-smi failures and Kubernetes GPU plugin crashes; the fix requires reinstalling DKMS packages for the new kernel and locking kernel versions to prevent recurrence.