I’m probably in a very small minority of people who use their NAS to game. I know — it’s supposed to be a NAS. But if I’m running a 4060 Ti with 16GB of VRAM and my Docker workloads barely touch it, why not leverage that power?
Why not use it for local cloud gaming?
Or go even further — attach a screen directly to the NAS and power a TV or monitor?
At that point, you might ask: is it even a NAS anymore?
Maybe not in the traditional sense. But in a homelab, hardware shouldn’t sit idle.
On a more serious note: ever since updating from TrueNAS 24 to 25, Steam headless has stopped working properly.
I’ve tested this with two GPUs — a 3060 Ti and a 4060 Ti. The only way I can get the display and GPU acceleration working inside Docker is by setting:
privileged: true
And honestly, anyone who even remotely cosplays as a sysadmin knows that’s a hard pill to swallow. Running privileged containers defeats the entire point of isolation.
At this point, I’m convinced it’s not Steam headless itself. Something changed in TrueNAS 25. I vaguely remember hearing about a kernel module or driver switch — possibly related to NVIDIA drivers or device passthrough — and I suspect that might be involved.
Interestingly, nvidia-smi does show the GPU inside the container, so the device is clearly visible. It just seems like the display portion won’t initialize properly unless the container is running in privileged mode.
And yes — this was originally drafted with ChatGPT, but only for grammar cleanup.
If anyone has insight into what changed between 24 and 25 regarding GPU access in Docker, I’d seriously appreciate the help.
Cheers.