Is hardware acceleration possible?

[frusanov]

Is hardware acceleration possible with this solution? Can you please add information about it in readme, i think it be very helpful.

[Thefrank]

It should work as long as: the kernel supports it (either directly or via modules), ffmpeg is compiled to support it, and the jail is able to expose the hardware correctly.

Unfortunately, I don't have any hardware to test support. My FreeBSD servers don't have any commodity hardware in them and NVIDIA Tesla-series cards are poorly supported by NVIDIA under FreeBSD.

[RossComputerGuy]

What device would need to be passed on TrueNAS to get an AMD CPU with an iGPU to do hardware acceleration?

[Thefrank]

drm-kmod or drm-510-kmod should work. the jail will need dri* and drm* exposed

[RossComputerGuy]

There's no dri* and drm* devices in /dev on TrueNAS.

[Thefrank]

does lspci list it? If yes, make sure the kernel module is loaded correctly.

[RossComputerGuy]

Yes, I see the device. How do you load kernel modules on TrueNAS? There's no modprobe like on Linux.

[Thefrank]

kldstat for listing
kldload to load
kldunload for unloading
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=kld&sektion=4

[RossComputerGuy]

Those modules don't exist on TrueNAS.

[Thefrank]

oh yeah TrueNAS. It might have drm and something like amdgpu. If not, you have a much harder task of adding it back in every time TrueNAS restarts and every time you update it.

[michaelburton]

Have a look at https://github.com/kern2011/Freenas-Quicksync. The instructions are for Plex on FreeNAS 11.3, but the driver loading and devfs ruleset creation should be the same.

You will probably also need to install the VAAPI packages for your GPU inside the jail.

[RossComputerGuy]

Ok, I have drm.ko and I loaded it. I have a lot of AMD GPU modules for my CPU.

Which modules will I need to load? I loaded them all by hand and I have a lot of devices in /dev/drm (257 in total).

[RossComputerGuy]

@michaelburton That guide is a bit out of date for TrueNAS Core 13.0-U3.1. I've spend the past 30 minutes trying to get /dev/drm to show up and it never doesn.

[michaelburton]

The instructions assume an Intel GPU. I don't have an AMD GPU to test with, and have no idea if it's possible at all.

[RossComputerGuy]

I think I got it, I was able to get /dev/drm to show up in the jail. I get about 41 FPS with trancoding "2001: A Space Odyssey".

In the ffmpeg log, I see this

Stream mapping:
  Stream #0:0 -> #0:0 (hevc (native) -> h264 (libx264))
  Stream #0:1 -> #0:1 (dts (dca) -> aac (native))

These are my settings for transcoding.

[Thefrank]

The log for ffmpeg should have something about hwaccel type (e.g., Using cuda hwaccel type dxva2 with new default device)