Custom AMI with nvidia driver via packer.

Question

Hello,   
  
I have a curious problem that I can seem to make heads or tails of.  I am using packer to create a custom AMI that includes the nvidia driver.  I am using the base ubuntu 16.04 image on a g4dn.xlarge instance as the packer base and packer completes successfully.  It installs the nvidia driver using the NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-440.33.01.run package.  Everything looks good, but when I provision a new ec2 instance from this ami, the nvidia driver is not loaded and I get "NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver. Make sure that the latest NVIDIA driver is installed and running." when running nvidia-smi.  I have tried adding extra steps to the packer project that follow the steps outlined here: https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSEC2/latest/UserGuide/install-nvidia-driver.html#public-nvidia-driver, but the result is always the same.   What I am missing here?  
  
Thanks   
Jeremy

Answer

I figured out the issue, I need to set the ephemeral storage devices that come with a g4dn in packer to no device:  
  
      "launch_block_device_mappings": \[  
        {  
          "device_name": "/dev/sda1",  
          "delete_on_termination": true,  
          "volume_size": "125",  
          "volume_type": "gp2"  
        },  
        {  
          "device_name": "/dev/sdb",  
          "no_device": true  
        },  
        {  
          "device_name": "/dev/sdc",  
          "no_device": true  
        }  
      ]

Custom AMI with nvidia driver via packer.

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