Table of Contents

OS Patching and Hardening

Gaudi nodes run the same base OS as the rest of our fleet, so they follow the same patching discipline — with one extra check because of the driver.

Supported OS: Ubuntu 22.04 LTS (preferred — best driver compatibility) or Ubuntu 24.04 LTS; RHEL 9.x for customers who need it for compliance reasons.

Patch SLA (same as everywhere else in the fleet)

Severity Patch within
Critical (CVSS 9.0+) 14 days
High (7.0–8.9) 30 days
Medium (4.0–6.9) Next quarterly maintenance window
Low Annually
The Gaudi-specific catch: the Gaudi driver is tied to a specific kernel version through DKMS. Before applying any kernel update, we check it against Intel's compatibility list. After the update, we confirm with dkms status that the driver rebuilt cleanly. If it didn't, we roll back to the previous kernel via GRUB and hold that node until a compatible driver build is available — we never leave a node running with a broken accelerator driver.

Hardening baseline (applied at provisioning, same as NVIDIA nodes)

Verification: a quarterly OpenSCAP compliance scan against the CIS Benchmark (Level 1) confirms the hardening baseline hasn't drifted.


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