DS918+ VMM Hardware Acceleration within DSM virtual machine

Plex Media Server NAS & Devices
1

Server Version#: latest
Player Version#: latest

Hello,
It will probably be impossible but hey, I could always ask right?
I have a Synology DS918+ with Plex installed on it. I also have a lifetime Plex subscription. It is all working just fine.

Today I installed a virtual DSM machine on my Synology. After that, I installed Plex on that virtual machine. I checked the setting for the ‘use hardware acceleration’ in the settings menu.
But I see the CPU of the virtual machine going very high. It seems like Plex cannot access hardware acceleration. The CPU usage is very high.

Maybe this has more to do with my Synology device than Plex itself. But perhaps someone has a solution to make the hardware capacity for hardware transcoding available within my Synology DSM vm.

Does anyone have experience with this?

2

Do you have access to the command line of the VM ?

If so, type ls -la /dev/dri.

You’ll need to see

[chuck@lizum ~.501]$ ls -la /dev/dri
total 0
drwxr-xr-x   3 root root       140 May 16 01:08 ./
drwxr-xr-x  20 root root      5060 May 16 01:08 ../
drwxr-xr-x   2 root root       120 May 16 01:08 by-path/
crw-rw----+  1 root video 226,   0 May 16 01:08 card0
crw-rw----+  1 root video 226, 128 May 16 01:08 renderD128
[chuck@lizum ~.502]$

I don’t believe Synology supports direct hardware / file system passthrough.

If they do, this is what you need to pass.

3

Thank you very much for your reply!
I do have access to the command line of the virtual machine, so I will try that later.

I am very curious if I will see the same information you wrote after running that command!

If it’s not the same than this might perhaps be useful information I can send to Synology.

So again thank you! :slight_smile:

4

I get the message below. So I guess the files/folders are not there. (I also tried with sudo…, to make sure I’ve got administrator permissions).

bash-4.3# ls -la /dev/dri
ls: cannot access /dev/dri: No such file or directory
bash-4.3#

Edit:

I also tried it on the host, so the machine that dóes have working Hardware Transcoding. There I got the following output:

bash-4.3# ls -la /dev/dri
total 0
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 100 Apr 9 06:02 .
drwxr-xr-x 14 root root 19040 May 17 17:45 …
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 0 May 16 12:13 card0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 64 May 16 12:13 controlD64
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226, 128 May 16 12:13 renderD128
bash-4.3#

5

That’s what I feared would happen.

In all my time using Synology (7 years now), I’ve never seen their VMM provide anything useful. It appears that, even now, it’s not changed.

My advice is to run native on the NAS and be done. You really can’t afford the overhead when using a Jxxx series CPU.

6

Thanks you very much again for your reply. I really appreciate it when people make effort to help others like this.

I do like Synology but I must say I haven’t had positive experience with Synology’s VMM either.

And I also think you are right about running natively on the NAS. From network/security perspective however, I would have liked it on the VM. My idea was to have a DSM VM in a different VLAN. I could then safely relatively safely forward a port (32400) to that virtual machine and wouldn’t have to expose the port to the host (the physical machine, ds918+ Synology NAS) directly to the internet.

7

Under normal circumstances, I agree.

I think their VMM is , sorry to say, a proprietary form of Docker.

it doesn’t even abstract the host. :man_shrugging:

8

Hm, interesting, especially what you’re mentioning about not abstracting the host. I wouldn’t want to go offtopic but if you have more information about this then I would appreciate it by PM.

9

PM sent

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