Hardware encoding under VMware with PCI Passthrough

Channels DVR Server
#1

Never one to shy away from fun problems...

I upgraded from VMware 6.7 to 7.0 tonight as well as moved my Channels DVR server to its own Ubuntu 20.04 VM.

Under the previous config (VMware 6.7/18.04) PCI passthrough of the Intel 630 graphics on my board worked as expected, hardware transcoding was available and it worked well.

After moving to VMware 7.0, Ubuntu 20.04, and having to reconfigure PCI passthrough, Channels no longer detects the hardware encoder.

lspci lists the passthrough device but I'm concerned that the VMware vga adapter takes precedence here:

00:0f.0 VGA compatible controller: VMware SVGA II Adapter
13:00.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation HD Graphics 630 (rev 04)

Ubuntu clearly switches to the passthrough device as output is available there and the virtual console stops working.

Hoping for some ideas here - I know it's a complex config but maybe I'm missing something easy in prioritizing the adapter?

1 Like
#2

What does ls -alh /dev/dri show

#3 
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root        120 Aug 20 00:08 by-path
crw-rw----  1 root video  226,   0 Aug 20 00:08 card0
crw-rw----  1 root video  226,   1 Aug 20 00:08 card1
crw-rw----  1 root render 226, 128 Aug 20 00:08 renderD128
crw-rw----  1 root render 226, 129 Aug 20 00:08 renderD129

Permissions?

The user channels-dvr runs under is in the video group.

RESOVLED - User must be in both video and render groups.

Thanks for the quick response.