Plex on Proxmox with Hardware Acceleration (help needed, thank you in advance)

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I put together a new home server using old threadripper parts and an interesting X399 board from Asrock that included dual 10g networking and an IPMI equivalent. Hardware:

  • TR 1920x
  • ASRock Rack X399D8A-2T
  • Seasonic 800w focus plus
  • 8xSAS drives ( Seagate Constellation E3 3TB)
  • 2xSamsung 970 Evo plus nvme m.2 (mirror 500GB )
  • 1xSamsung 860 Evo SATA ( Cache )
  • LSI SAS 9210-8i

Installed Proxmox, created a TrueNas Core VM, passthrough the LSI controller and the small SSD created another zfs pool over there and created network shares to communicate, so far so good.

Then I followed “Craft Computing Youtube Guide on This” IDK if links are permitted here, so I will not link, but searching for plex on proxmox is likely to find you his video. I followed these steps.

  • Created Ubuntu server LTS 20 VM
  • Enabled repository updating as per Plex Guide
  • Installed Plex
  • Added libraries from the share

— GPU pass trough Journey begins here —

ON HOST (Proxmox)

  • Included “quiet intel_iommu=on iommu=pt pcie_acs_override=downstream,multifunction nofb nomodeset video=vesafb:off,efifb:off” /etc/kernel/cmdline ( I use systemd not grub )
  • proxmox-boot-tool refresh
  • included the following in /etc/modules:
    vfio
    vfio_iommu_type1
    vfio_pci
    vfio_virqfd
  • IOMMU interrupt remaping:
    echo “options vfio_iommu_type1 allow_unsafe_interrupts=1” > /etc/modprobe.d/iommu_unsafe_interrupts.conf
    echo “options kvm ignore_msrs=1” > /etc/modprobe.d/kvm.conf
  • Blacklist drivers
    echo “blacklist radeon” >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
    echo “blacklist nouveau” >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
    echo “blacklist nvidia” >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist.conf
  • reboot
  • added GPU to VFIO ( I made sure the I got the correct Id’s)
    echo “options vfio-pci ids=10de:1c31,10de:10f1 disable_vga=1”> /etc/modprobe.d/vfio.conf
  • update-initramfs -u
    -reboot

ON GUEST ( Ubuntu LTS 20.04.2 live server amd64 )

  • Download nVidia Drivers
    sudo apt update
    wget https : // international.download.nvidia.com /XFree86/Linux-x86_64 /###.##.##/NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64- ###.##.## . run
    sudo chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-x86_64-###.##.##.run

  • Disable Nouveau drivers in kernel-
    sudo bash -c “echo blacklist nouveau > /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf”
    sudo bash -c “echo options nouveau modset=0 >> /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist-nvidia-nouveau.conf”
    sudo update-initramfs -u

  • reboot

ON HOST (PROXMOX)

  • Hide VM identifiers from Nvidia
    SSH into ProxMox
    cd /etc/pve/qemu-server
    nano ###.conf (# is the VM identifier of your Plex server)
    Modify cpu line…
    cpu: host,hidden=1
    Save file and exit.
    Start Plex VM.
    Nvidia-smi to confirm GPU is working.

—THE PROBLEM—

At this lspci -v inside the VM returns the PCIe device and returns the correct driver in use, but…

nvidia-msi
No devices Found

I’ve also changed the bios to UEFI ( OMVF )
and turned off SR-IOV on bare metal bios, since I read this was a good idea because I’m passing through a single GPU

At this point I don’t know if nvdia-msi is a good testing tool or if there are better ways to make sure that it is working

If there are other commands or config files I should look like pls let me know and how to test if the gpu is working or not.

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I don’t use plex much, but i’m pretty sure that your HW acceleration is working. Its just that to run nvidia-smi you need root access (sudo) but don’t quote me on that. Have you actually tried to use nVENC? Or do you just think it won’t work, also what card do you have sorry if you put it somewhere in the post but I can’t seem to find it. Also this echo “options vfio-pci ids=10de:1c31,10de:10f1 disable_vga=1”> /etc/modprobe.d/vfio.conf is for a Quadro P2200 (which is the card I assume you have). If the card is actually being reported as being binded to the nvidia/nouveau driver i’m pretty sure that it will work, and also nvidia always allowed quadro cards to be passed through into vm’s

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Yeah, it is a PNY Quadro P2200 and I can’t get my plex server to transcode with it. When I click the "Use Hardware Acceleration When Available " The videos just get stuck and don’t play

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[Transcode] [FFMPEG] - → CUDA_ERROR_NO_DEVICE: no CUDA-capable device is detected

Finally after 10 min of a black screen it gave up and started transcoding on CPU with this error message

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I just wanted to make an update. I was finally able to solve the GPU passthrough issue. The last thing I needed for it to work was to change the primary graphics setting in bios from PCIe to internal VGA; now this disables my ability to connect a monitor to the server, but I can still access the bios screen if needed and thanks to it being proxmox, I can access the console in the web UI directly so no issues there. But yeah, passthrough is working now without any problems.

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Glad you figured it out. I did it in a LXC container so my steps were a little different. And I also have proxmox runnning the ZFS file system I use for my “NAS”. I used the guide here from “peanut” I think.