When booting, if NVIDIA_GPU_DRV has been installed first, it will be running before PMS starts. There is no Start/Stop/Enable/Disable control. It always starts.
QNAP processes the installed packages list sequentially (Ignoring the RC_NUM value .. which they document they do) during boot.
Therefore, If NVIDIA is installed first, PMS will see it.
If the GPU is not supported for transcoding then Plex will attempt to use it but will fail at transcode time.
When PMS starts on 64-bit machines, it looks for the GPU card to respond.
If it does,
- Makes certain it finds the drivers
- Makes certain the card is not assigned to a VM or container (in QTS mode)
- Conditions met, it adds the GPU driver libraries to the environment for PMS to use
This process has been working since Nvidia support was added.
I was attempting to resolve the timing issue where folks added a Nvidia GPU and drivers AFTER PMS was installed (which means the drivers start after PMS does.. and PMS wonāt find it at startup)
For most of us, drivers are loaded permanently into the OS.
QNAP does it differently because of their nonvolatile OS DOM chip on the motherboard. The Nvidia drivers werenāt added there nor did QNAP deem it appropriate to support a user-installed driver library directory set.
I think I have this figured out now.
My only challenge is, as PMS starts, How long to wait for the Nvidia drivers to become ready before proceeding (when to abandon the card and continue without it). Theoretically, it should be ready but Iāve learned to be pessimistic
