Battlemage Support

When will there be official support for the battlemage GPUs? Unraid 7.1.0 beta1 supports battlemage and Plex detects it in the transcoder menu. It just can’t/won’t use it.

LunarLake and BattleMage are supported.

Next step is to look at your beta OS release.

Expecting fully functional support for a new processor at the first beta is pushing it a bit.

We waited over a year for the Linux kernel to support the Intel AlderLake processors correctly and be usable for Plex.

Is Battlemage now confirmed working on Linux? Is there a particular kernel requirement?

Last I tried, it seemed that the requirement for xe driver (and dropped support of old driver) meant that we would need an Intel Media Driver update. I thought we would be waiting until the major transcoder upgrade.

According to kernel ,

6.14 has the updated i915 and xe driver support in it.

Look at known issues here: (at the bottom)

Hmm maybe I need to try this again then. Though when I tried last time, I built that driver (and some dependancies) from source to get xe support early, and then I think I came to the conclusion that I couldn’t use my own iHD_drv_video.so file, even though I had the working package from Intel. Wrong entrypoints or something.

I remember thinking that we needed an update on your end, though maybe it was because I run in Docker. I recall dealing with the HuC/GuC stuff (from known issues), I don’t think that was the problem.

Either way its probably due time that I start over, I kind of butchered my OS install with backported kernel and self-compiled GPU drivers lol. The cutting edge can be so painful.

Though going through that got my Arrow Lake CPU working with Plex (which turned out to be quite good, so I didn’t mind putting BMG on ice for now).

You can’t use your own library file. Plex uses MUSL not glibc for its runtimes.
The MUSL loader must know the where everything to load is.
This is predefined in the Plex-distributed package.

When you push in your own pieces, you break what exists.

I’ve messaged the transcoder engineer and asked for details / confirmation of the different pieces on BMG

Awesome, I’d be curious to know what they say. I guess that would suggest that the new kernel and intel-media-driver won’t help until those new driver files are also packaged with PMS?

Thanks for consistantly being so responsive and an absolute asset to the community.

If we had a custom kernel installed running 6.14 and the xe driver, plex still wouldn’t recognize it?

Once Unraid is out of Beta and actually released, then we can take this more seriously.

First Beta of a new OS release is NOT pretty.

Trying to debug this is like hurding cats.

PMS works with compliant kernels. The problems arise when a non-standard kernel gets brought into the mix. (It’s OK to compile your own as long as all the boxes are properly checked)

Before Plex, I did kernel & driver work. In the past 10 years, the kernel has gotten insanely complex.

I read that Thor’s custom kernel is 6.14. I’m willing to try it, and I know it’s not supported here or by Unraid. I’m just wondering if it’s worth a shot. If Plex still wouldn’t use those drivers though it’s not worth trying.

An understatement. As a dev, kernel & driver (and firmware) are the things I won’t touch with a 10 foot pole.

I know this is an Unraid thread, but as a non-Unraid user, I’d just like to see confirmation that at least one person has BMG working on any kernel.

Not to derail this even more, however we have someone about to try a custom unraid kernel and the BMG to see if it works. I’ll update when I know more.

I just wish I knew if it was worth the hassle from archmage to battlemage for transcoding purposes.

I’m not going to be Doubting Thomas here but we do need be objective and manage expectations.

  1. Announced in December
  2. Launched in January
  3. Everyone wants it 3 months later

A lot of folks waited over a year for AlderLake support in the kernel

Optimistic & Try? HECK YES

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Agreed, expectations managed. Just monitoring every mention of “Battlemage” in the forums lol.

The greater disappointment than lack of BMG support, is the fact that Arrow Lake iGPU absolutely SHREDS for HEVC transcoding, so buying a dGPU was essentially a waste of money, even once its supported. Blue GPU is cool though :upside_down_face:

I ALMOST bought a MeteorLake CPU.
When I found out all the problems it has, I dropped it faster than a hot rock.

I may be dated but NUC12DCMI9 (full) with RTX 2000 (ada gen) is hard to beat
Its iGPU actually works well too.

QSV is unmatched for transcodes/watt. As long as you avoid the 3 consecutive generations of instability…

Is your RTX 2000 external?

Yes,

The NUC has enough room for the element and this GPU.

I picked the NUC12 (Intel’s last real NUC) because of SSDs, GPU, and a native 10GbE NIC (my LAN is 10GbE - xs724em)

the skull on the front was a cool touch :wink:

Intel Xe2 Lunar Lake & Battlemage Graphics: Official Support in Linux 6.12

This article seems to state that 6.12 has BMG and Xe2 support.

Look at

Until then, early Ubuntu 24.10 users may face a lack of out-of-the-box support, but Ubuntu 25.04 should address this next spring, along with other autumn Linux distribution releases.

My god that is a BEEFY NUC. At an old job we shipped shucked NUCs embedded in our products, but they were all single-board mini PCs. I didn’t know they had big boy NUCs too.

I’m in the process of a 10GbE upgrade and would consider a machine like that, but they really don’t seem to have come down in price.

@Shades228 I’m pretty sure kernel support alone won’t help us here. When I tried it I was using kernel 6.12.9 and a compiled intel-media-driver that was supposed to support it. I think we need kernel, driver, and PMS packaged with newer driver. Though I’d love to be proven wrong if someone can get it working.

BMG might be unique in this way, because it dropped support for older driver instead of remaining backwards compatible like Alchemist and CPUs did. Xe is now required.