[SOLVED] Trouble getting Quicksync to work on the host

[backdoc]

My CPU is Intel(R) Xeon(R) E-2146G CPU @ 3.50GHz.

I have installed intel-media-va-driver-non-free and vainfo. And, I have configured the 2 environment variables:

• export LIBVA_DRIVERS_PATH=/usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri
• export LIBVA_DRIVER_NAME=iHD

When I run vainfo, I get the following:

root@proxmox:~# vainfo
error: can't connect to X server!
libva info: VA-API version 1.10.0
libva info: User environment variable requested driver 'iHD'
libva info: Trying to open /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
libva info: Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_10
DRM_IOCTL_I915_GEM_APERTURE failed: Invalid argument
Assuming 131072kB available aperture size.
May lead to reduced performance or incorrect rendering.
get chip id failed: -1 [22]
param: 4, val: 0
libva error: /usr/lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/dri/iHD_drv_video.so init failed
libva info: va_openDriver() returns 18
vaInitialize failed with error code 18 (invalid parameter),exit

I'm not sure what driver should be installed. I have currently manually loaded i915 as a troubleshooting step with modprobe.

root@proxmox:~# lsmod | grep video
video                  53248  1 i915

I had thought that this was the incorrect and had blacklisted in /etc/modprobe.d/pve-blacklist.conf, but I have removed it from the blacklist. But, when I boot up, no module at all automatically loads. I want to say when I first started working on this, the ast driver was loading automatically. I don't know if I did something that messed that up. Maybe I purged the intel-media-va-driver and that uninstalled something I need. I've done so many things that I can't recall for sure. That seems like a problem.

Any ideas of what I might try next?

EDIT: 5/3/2022 - most responses to questions about Quicksync that I find online reference renderD128 or renderD129. When I look in /dev/dri, I only have "by-path" and "card0". That seems to be part (or all) of my problem. But, I'm not sure why I don't have it. I wonder if I should remove the intel non-free package and compile from source?

 

[backdoc]

I am replying to my own post to hopefully bump it. I have still not been able to solve this. Is Quicksync supposed to work out of the box with pve-manager/7.2-3/c743d6c1?

Are the steps I took in my original post supposed to be all you need to do? I guess I can try compiling the current source. But, I don't really like doing that. I'd rather continue to use builtin apt packages.

I see several posts trying to figure out how to pass quicksync to the LXC and/or VM. But, I don't see anyone struggling to get it working on the host. I thought about reinstalling Proxmox. But, I'd want to be sure I had good backups so that I didn't lose all of my work so far. I haven't researched how to do that because I hope I don't need to do that and I'm not sure I *need* to do that.

 

[backdoc]

I solved this and am sharing back with anyone who might find this later. The problem was the missing /dev/dri/renderD128 character device. To get renderD128 to appear, you need to be sure that the CPU Internal Graphics are "ENABLED" in the BIOS. My motherboard is the Supermicro X11SCH-LN4F. And, my CPU is the Xeon E-2146G.

Go to Advanced -> System Agent (SA) Configuration



Then, ensure "Internal Graphics" are enabled.



Ultimately, my goal was to get hardware encoding in Plex, on an LXC. These github instructions were pretty copy and paste for me. Main difference was my Render gid. Everywhere the instructions said 108, I had to replace with 103 (my host's render GID). One tip when modifying the conf file. It took a little fiddling for me to get it working. I think my issues were that I wasn't closing the LXC conf file between edits. That seemed to make a difference, YMMV.

Good luck. I hope this helps someone with a Supermicro motherboard.