I’m just about to upgrade my FreeNAS 11.2 server (FreeBSD 11.2) hardware which runs PMS and have an interesting question about HW transcode.
I wish to upgrade to a Supermicro X11SCH-F board which only has an IPMI video. No “local” video port exists. So the big question is:
If I buy a processor with GPU (e.g. i3 9100 or E2146G), the processor has QSV support but do I have any access to it given that the video “goes nowhere” (i.e. there is no video port for it). Or does the board, maybe, have a built in dummy plug (very wishful thinking!!!). Maybe out of the box it will work for ENC but not for DEC (as I’ve seen you need a dummy video plug to get DEC to work in many cases). Also, maybe the IPMI video will be the default and I’m totally out of luck.
Bear with me, I’m OK with PMS and FreeNAS but this GPU stuff is not all that clear to me.
I have my FeeBSD PMS running on a intel nuc with HDMI and I can run plex with HWT support (in a jail even)
I dont’ need Xorg or anything, hdmi is there and connected to the monitor (but I’m often using that same monitor with Display Port).
Some reports here actually seem to indicate that if the video port is not in use (i.e dummy hdmi cable) this doesn’t always work… (I can’t remember exactly what was the issue or even find the thread now for some reason) all I can say is that it does work for me, DEC/ENC with Intel Quick sync which is the only one we support anyway.
However this is in FreeBSD 12 using drm-fbsd12.0-kmod (you don’t even need to install the libva-intel-driver, that’s handled by pms; first times I played with this I though it was needed but its not)
One other thing is that the plex user needs to be in the video group.
That said are you sure there’s no video port at all?
Unfortunately, I strongly believe it has no video port except the one that is used by IPMI (remote BIOS access) which is an ASPEED AST2500 accessible over ethernet. I’m almost certain that the video of the CPU/GPU is not connected to any connector.
You mention QSV is the only way you support it. What about NVDEC/NVENC? I think I’ve seen many posts about that working (though that doesn’t mean supported!).
The great news is that Supermicro just verified that the GPU shows up in Windows (UHD P630 in their case) so even though there is no connection to it, it is still available for processing. This is extremely encouraging.
Wonder if I will need to play tricks to get the encode (or is it decode?) working since I can’t use a dummy video plug.
How do you do this exactly? I’m trying to get hardware acceleration working, but everything I’ve looked up and tried hasn’t seemed to work. Where / when do you load drm-fbsd12.0-kmod?
Follow the pkg-message instructions after install and that should be it (note the part that you must add users that need to use this to the video group so be sure to add plex.
I have a hdmi connected to my intel nuc, although I mostly ssh in its there If I need it so I never tested without it unplug, but other users have reported the same.
