Nvidia GPU not detected inside Jellyfin container

[skittle]

I have been fighting this for hours but finally got it to work, so I made an account to reply.

Some prerequisites:

• Follow NVIDIA guide to install the container toolkit
  
• I found that it was a good sanity check to run a sample load as they document here. This proved that it wasn't a hardware, driver, or containerization issue.
  

So if you get this far,

1. You can run nvidia-smi in your host OS (or VM, doesn't matter for this)

2. You can't run nvidia-smi in the jellyfin container. It gets killed when you try. This is running with 

Code:

docker exec -it jellyfin bash

for me.

Code:

root@jellyfin:/# nvidia-smi
Sun Dec  7 21:25:58 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 550.163.01            Driver Version: 550.163.01    CUDA Version: 12.4    |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |          Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                        |                        |              MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
Killed

At this point, if you're like me, you've been beating up the container quite a bit for a while. In my case, I'm trying to rebuild a VM that worked just fine until I unfortunately deleted it and needed to start over. So, I know that something is not fundamentally wrong. Here is what worked for me. 

Code:

sudo apt update
sudo apt upgrade
sudo apt purge 'nvidia-*' 'libnvidia-*' 'cuda-*'

# Remove any old DKMS modules
sudo dkms status

sudo dkms remove -m nvidia -v 550.163.01 --all
# example

sudo apt autoremove --purge -y
sudo apt clean
sudo reboot

Okay, now we should be at a clean restarting point. Reinstall the NVIDIA driver and toolkit. 

Code:

sudo apt install -y linux-headers-$(uname -r) nvidia-driver firmware-misc-nonfree
sudo reboot

Test the driver on the host again. 

Code:

$ nvidia-smi
Sun Dec  7 21:54:51 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 550.163.01            Driver Version: 550.163.01    CUDA Version: 12.4    |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |          Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                        |                        |              MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|  0  Quadro P2000                  Off |  00000000:09:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 45%  32C    P8              4W /  75W |      2MiB /  5120MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                        |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU  GI  CI        PID  Type  Process name                              GPU Memory |
|        ID  ID                                                              Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

Now get to work on the container toolkit. 

Code:

sudo apt purge -y nvidia-container-toolkit nvidia-container-toolkit-base \
                libnvidia-container-tools libnvidia-container1 \
                libnvidia-container0
sudo apt autoremove --purge -y
sudo apt clean

Follow installation instructions from NVIDIA website linked above. 

----------------------

Now you need to work on your Docker Compose file. Make sure these are in there somewhere:

Code:

   
services:
  jellyfin:
    gpus: all
    environment:
      - NVIDIA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=all
      - NVIDIA_DRIVER_CAPABILITIES=compute,video,utility

Now bring down the container and force rebuild it. 

Code:

$ docker compose up -d --force-recreate

The GPU check now executed instantly, and I can die happy. 

Code:

$ docker exec -it jellyfin nvidia-smi
Sun Dec  7 21:36:09 2025
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 550.163.01            Driver Version: 550.163.01    CUDA Version: 12.4    |
|-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name                Persistence-M | Bus-Id          Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf          Pwr:Usage/Cap |          Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|                                        |                        |              MIG M. |
|=========================================+========================+======================|
|  0  Quadro P2000                  On  |  00000000:09:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 45%  33C    P8              4W /  75W |      2MiB /  5120MiB |      0%      Default |
|                                        |                        |                  N/A |
+-----------------------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                                              |
|  GPU  GI  CI        PID  Type  Process name                              GPU Memory |
|        ID  ID                                                              Usage      |
|=========================================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                            |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

I don't know what actually happened here, but the only way that I found to fix it was basically to take a hammer to everything, get it all level, and recreate it. Something with the current NVIDIA driver was getting out of sync with the container toolkit and the container itself. Once everything was level, recreating it seemed to work for me. Good luck.