GPU passthrough and Plex transcoding

Hello,

Anybody has plex transcoding working in an LXD container? There is a guide available and instructions for LXC.

I have tried setting it up using LXD but plex fails to recognize it. Here is my LXD config,

$ lxc config show plex
architecture: x86_64
config:
  image.architecture: amd64
  image.description: Archlinux current amd64 (20190406_04:18)
  image.os: Archlinux
  image.release: current
  image.serial: "20190406_04:18"
  nvidia.runtime: "true"
  volatile.base_image: de43692c92c19e78d99b1168955f629129529599e00adca4256b858473a330e9
  volatile.eth0.name: eth0
  volatile.idmap.base: "0"
  volatile.idmap.next: '[{"Isuid":true,"Isgid":true,"Hostid":1000000,"Nsid":0,"Maprange":1000000000}]'
  volatile.last_state.idmap: '[{"Isuid":true,"Isgid":true,"Hostid":1000000,"Nsid":0,"Maprange":1000000000}]'
  volatile.last_state.power: RUNNING
devices:
  eth0:
    nictype: bridged
    parent: vlan300br
    type: nic
  gpu:
    gid: "986"
    type: gpu
  sharemedia:
    path: /mnt/media
    source: /mnt/media
    type: disk
ephemeral: false
profiles:
- default
stateful: false
description: ""

nvidia -smi works insider the container,

# nvidia-smi 
Sun Apr  7 18:44:25 2019       
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| NVIDIA-SMI 418.56       Driver Version: 418.56       CUDA Version: 10.1     |
|-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
| GPU  Name        Persistence-M| Bus-Id        Disp.A | Volatile Uncorr. ECC |
| Fan  Temp  Perf  Pwr:Usage/Cap|         Memory-Usage | GPU-Util  Compute M. |
|===============================+======================+======================|
|   0  GeForce GT 1030     Off  | 00000000:82:00.0 Off |                  N/A |
| 40%   55C    P0    N/A /  30W |      0MiB /  2001MiB |      1%      Default |
+-------------------------------+----------------------+----------------------+
                                                                               
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Processes:                                                       GPU Memory |
|  GPU       PID   Type   Process name                             Usage      |
|=============================================================================|
|  No running processes found                                                 |
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The /dev/dri directory shows both the onboard and the nvidia card.

[root@plex ~]# ls -lh /dev/dri/
total 2.0K
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226,   0 Apr  7 10:12 card0
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226,   1 Apr  7 10:12 card1
crw-rw---- 1 root video 226,   0 Apr  7 10:12 controlD64
crw-rw-rw- 1 root video 226, 128 Apr  7 10:12 renderD128
[root@plex ~]# ls -lh /dev/nv* 
crw-rw-rw- 1 nobody nobody 235,   0 Apr  7 10:06 /dev/nvidia-uvm
crw-rw-rw- 1 nobody nobody 235,   1 Apr  7 10:06 /dev/nvidia-uvm-tools
crw-rw-rw- 1 root   video  195,   0 Apr  7 10:12 /dev/nvidia0
crw-rw-rw- 1 nobody nobody 195, 255 Apr  6 21:11 /dev/nvidiactl
[root@plex ~]#

I believe plex is trying to use card0 which is the onboard card which obviously fails. Is it possible to disable export of card0 in the container and only allow card1?

Plesk should have a facility to select which card to use for transcoding.
That should be quite a simple feature.

I went through the relevant Plesk discussion, and specifically

Can you verify that your card can actually perform encoding as you are trying to do?
In addition, you are using the Arch container image. In your case, I would try with Ubuntu, and even better with some simple demo just to make sure that the container is really working.

I replaced my card to a Nvidia P2000 GPU and can confirm that the transcoding works on Arch Host/Container. On the host I had to install 32 bit libraries as well (‘lib32-nvidia-utils’ package) and nvidia-container-runtime before the transcoding worked.

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