What are my options for Nvidia hardware acceleration?

[imsocold]

I recently built a new Truenas core server and would like to run Plex with Nvidia based hardware acceleration.
I have seen conflicting information regarding how to do this.

Hardware:
Asrock Rack D2550 D4i Avoton Board
Nvidia Quadro P400

Current Research:
Reading through the existing threads here and elsewhere it seems that Nvidia P400 drivers have been added to BSD and so should theoretically should be supported.
How well that translates to Truenas core is unclear.
Freeness Scale seems to be based on Debian and so it would undoubtedly be supported and I have some experience with Debian so I am confident in my ability to get it working

So the options seem to be:

1. Run Plex in a Truenas Core Jail with resources representing the video card passed to the Jail.
2. Run Plex in a Truenas Core Byve VM with the card passed through to the VM.
3. Run Plex in a Truenas Scale docker instance with the resources representing the card passed to the docker instance.

Many of threads I have read are rather old.

I do not think option 2 is a good option for me as there is conflicting information about whether my board is actually supported for virtualization.
The intel website say the board supports VT-d but literally everyone else on the internet says otherwise.

I am not married to running Freenas Core and if migrating to Freenas Scale would make this easier I would gladly do that.
Thanks for whatever help you can provide.

 

[Kris Moore]

If you're setting this up fresh, I'd recommend you start with SCALE for this kind of workload... RC2 is landing tomorrow, and should be pretty stable for your average plex setup, while providing the easiest path forward for upgrades later.

 

[imsocold]

If you're setting this up fresh, I'd recommend you start with SCALE for this kind of workload... RC2 is landing tomorrow, and should be pretty stable for your average plex setup, while providing the easiest path forward for upgrades later.

Thank you.
This is a fresh install, I am currently in the process of ZFS sending from the old pool to the new one, so once that is done I will export the pool and rebuild the machine as Truenas Core.

One more question if you don't mind.
I installed Truenas on an external USB stick for the simple reason that I don't want to dedicate an entire flash disk to such a tiny install?
I would rather use the flash disk as a storage target for any docker instances, is there a simple way that you know of to resize the Truenas install after install?

I just ordered an 120GB SSD and Ideally I would like to dedicate 20GB to the Truenas install, and 100GB to docker.

 

[Kris Moore]

All the docker data will end up on your storage pool by default. The boot device is dedicated and cannot be partitioned this way right now. The idea is that if you lose a boot-disk, you don't lose any actual data.

 

[imsocold]

All the docker data will end up on your storage pool by default. The boot device is dedicated and cannot be partitioned this way right now. The idea is that if you lose a boot-disk, you don't lose any actual data.

I figured as much, but as you might understand this stuff gets expensive very fast.
Can the docker data be moved to another drive?

Thanks again for all the help. It's genuinely appreciated.

 

[Kris Moore]

I figured as much, but as you might understand this stuff gets expensive very fast.
Can the docker data be moved to another drive?

Thanks again for all the help. It's genuinely appreciated.

Yes, in the UI / Apps page you can select which pool will contain your docker / app data.

 

[imsocold]

Yes, in the UI / Apps page you can select which pool will contain your docker / app data.

Absolutely awesome.
Thanks for the feedback and please keep up the amazing work.

 

[HarryMuscle]

Thank you.
This is a fresh install, I am currently in the process of ZFS sending from the old pool to the new one, so once that is done I will export the pool and rebuild the machine as Truenas Core.

One more question if you don't mind.
I installed Truenas on an external USB stick for the simple reason that I don't want to dedicate an entire flash disk to such a tiny install?
I would rather use the flash disk as a storage target for any docker instances, is there a simple way that you know of to resize the Truenas install after install?

I just ordered an 120GB SSD and Ideally I would like to dedicate 20GB to the Truenas install, and 100GB to docker.

FYI, there is a reasonable simple unofficial way to accomplish this if you're comfortable with the command line.

Thanks,
Harry

 

[imsocold]

FYI, there is a reasonable simple unofficial way to accomplish this if you're comfortable with the command line.

Thanks,
Harry

Go on....

 

[HarryMuscle]

Go on....

Here's a basic outline of how to install TrueNAS Scale into a smaller partition and leave room for data partitions on the installation drive:

Boot installation media
Select Shell
Run:
sed -i ‘s/sgdisk -n3:0:0/sgdisk -n3:0:+16G/’ /usr/sbin/truenas-install
truenas-install
Select Install/Upgrade and proceed with installation as usual
Once TrueNAS Scale is running use the shell to create a 4th or 5th partition (depending whether you have a swap partition) on the installation drive and then create the ZFS pool for your data inside that partition. Export the new pool via the shell and then import it via the GUI.

Works great for me so far. If you want to use a larger installation partition change the "+16G" in the command above to something larger like "+32G", etc. Also, if you want to force a swap partition (some drives are considered too small), you can run "SWAP_IS_SAFE=YES truenas-install" instead of "truenas-install" when starting the installer again.

Hope this helps,
Harry