Category: Fedora

Fedora related posts

Nvidia driver improvements for Fedora 25+

slaanesh 27 Comments

The Nvidia repository now contains all the remaining bits for the work done by Hans De Goede.

Making an Optimus laptop work as expected with the Nvidia drivers should be much less painful than it was a few years ago and most of the things should work out of the box on Fedora 25+.

Just enable the repository on a pristine Fedora installation, and after a while you should be able to search for Nvidia, CUDA, GeForce to Quadro to make the driver, control panel and other programs appear in your Gnome Software search:

Optimus laptops

The driver should install and operate cleanly whether you are installing it on a system which has one or more discrete Nvidia cards or an Optimus laptop with an Intel and a Nvidia card. Nothing to do to enable or configure Optimus.

This is up to the point that when the drivers are installed, you can even turn off Optimus on or off in your system Bios (if your laptop allows that) and the only difference you should see is that there’s an additional VGA card enabled in your system (check with lspci) and that the Nvidia control panel switches between a PRIME Display, like in this picture:

And a normal RandR managed one, like in this one:

Everything else should not be different from your normal experience.

Limitations

Nvidia driver

The limitations are the same as provided by the Nvidia driver, this means that if you are running it on an Optimus laptop, the Intel card can never power off. Which means higher power consumption, unfortunately. If you have an Optimus laptop and absolutely need the proprietary drivers, my suggestion is still to disable Optimus in the Bios.

OSS stack

On the contrary, if you use the OSS stack (nouveau/intel) the second card can be powered off if there’s no application running on it or display directly connected to one of the card’s outputs. That’s the best reason to use the OSS drivers at all if you you’re not doing serious gaming or 3D work:

$ sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
0:IGD:+:Pwr:0000:00:02.0
1:DIS: :DynOff:0000:01:00.0

You also got the nifty selection menu about running your game on the discrete card on Gnome, which is really cool:

It will power up the video card just before launching the process. Launching a program through that menu entry is like starting it from the command line with the DRI_PRIME variable declared. For example, the same as above would be:

$ DRI_PRIME=1 quake3 &
$ sudo cat /sys/kernel/debug/vgaswitcheroo/switch
0:IGD:+:Pwr:0000:00:02.0
1:DIS: :DynPwr:0000:01:00.0

As you can see, the discrete video card is turned on. For Steam, you still need to edit each of your game to run on the Nvidia card:

SLI systems

SLI is now enabled by default with the Auto profile, there’s nothing to do if you have a SLI system. If you need any different SLI option (AA, SFR, etc.), just override it in X.org configuration files.

Nouveau fallback

With the new expanded OutputClass support for X, as carried out by Hans, it’s now super easy to switch to the OSS stack if the proprietary Nvidia driver somehow does not work. No user space component is touched, as soon as the Nvidia kernel module is not loaded (check on /sys/module/nvidia), the desktop starts with the normal OSS components you get with a normal installation. Thanks to all the work done on libglvnd, the libraries loaded are the correct one for the driver you are running.

This means that the performance of the Nvidia card would be abysmal, but still you would get a nice desktop and browser to Google around for answers on how to fix it :).

Upgrade path from Nvidia CUDA, ELRepo and RPMFusion repositories

The current packages should allow you to upgrade if you have any Nvidia component installed on your system from one of the mentioned repositories. All upgrade paths, obsolency and packaging rename should be taken into account.

This has been cool for a few years, and actually helped me a lot in migrating some installed CUDA clusters to the packages hosted here. As part of ongoing discussions with a few parties (mostly Red Hat), this is going to disappear to allow later an opposite upgrade path to one of the other repositories (RPMFusion/Nvidia).

As of the 15th of May, all Nvidia packages will be marked with Conflicts instead of Obsoletes/Provides for all the other repositories out there. I will update the installation and repository page accordingly. If you have anything installed from the RPMFusion, ELRepo or CUDA repository from Nvidia and want to switch to the packages here after the 15th of May, you must “wildcard remove” all Nvidia and CUDA packages on your system prior to proceeding with the installation.

I’m not planning to remove any other feature in terms of capability or packaging option.

Compatibility GCC 5.3.1 package for Fedora

As some might have noticed, since a few days there’s a new compat-gcc-53 package in the Fedora repositories. This is only intended for compiling CUDA programs on Fedora where the latest update to Clang 3.9 actually broke the last compiler compatible with CUDA 8.

$ rpm -ql compat-gcc-53 compat-gcc-53-c++ | grep /bin/
/usr/bin/gcc53
/usr/bin/gcov53
/usr/bin/g++53

If you need to build a package using it, you can check for examples in the Blender and CCMiner packages as in the multimedia repository:

https://github.com/negativo17/blender/blob/master/blender.spec#L57-L61
https://github.com/negativo17/blender/blob/master/blender-2.78a-cuda.patch#L19-L23
https://github.com/negativo17/ccminer/blob/master/ccminer.spec#L75-L82

This way, I was able to provide the Blender package with CUDA support also on Fedora 26 even after the Clang update from 3.8 to 3.9.

The package is also available as a COPR repository if you prefer to use official Nvidia CUDA packages instead of the ones provided here.

To do list

Figure out what to do with the PRIME Synchronization configuration:

https://github.com/negativo17/nvidia-driver/issues/13
https://github.com/negativo17/nvidia-driver/blob/master/nvidia.conf#L2-L5

All reports have been mixed so far. On my systems (including a SLI one) works fine.

Big multimedia repository update (CUDA enablements, rebases, new software)

slaanesh 72 Comments

Merging of the Nvidia repository into Multimedia

The whole multimedia repository has been rebased with recent releases, and it now features FFmpeg 3.2 as the foundation. Most of the programs that suppport some Nvidia integration are now enabled and compiled with support for CUDA/NVENC/CUVID; leveraging the previous reorganization of CUDA 8 in the various subpackages.

This means that all the Nvidia packages are now included in the repository as well, so if you have an Nvidia card and you are interested in both repositories, you can just have the multimedia repository enabled. If you still just want the Nvidia stuff (as enabled in Fedora 25) then it’s still available as a separate repository; and that will not change.

Why all of this? Because I can’t keep them separated anymore. The Nvidia repository can exist on its own, but the multimedia one can’t, due to the dependencies and the constant rebases (also of main Fedora and CentOS/RHEL packages). You can use the Nvidia repository alone, if you just need that, or use the multimedia one if you need everything else.

The repository is now exposed also at this URL, and contains Delta RPM support:

https://negativo17.org/repos/multimedia

All repository files and configurations have been updated, so this means that in the future this would be the place where the metadata and repository information will be placed and any new installation will get the repository from there. If you are reading this blog post, you can switch now. I will add a negativo17-release package soon, along with a few mirrors; I’m sorting out the details now with the mirror owners.

FFmpeg and other CUDA enablements

To make proper use of the Nvidia hardware encode features (NVENC/CUVID) and CUDA kernel support (i.e. Blender GPU rendering) in the various programs you need the Nvidia driver installed (nvidia-driver-cuda), and for Nvidia Performance Primitives you require the CUDA driver and the NPP library package (cuda-npp).

This means that for most people NOT requiring CUDA support or not using an Nvidia video card, the following 2 packages will be installed anyway:

$ ls -alghs nvidia-driver-cuda-libs*.rpm cuda-npp*.rpm 
92M -rw-r--r-T. 1 mock 92M Nov 16 12:35 cuda-npp-8.0.44-6.fc25.x86_64.rpm
22M -rw-r--r-T. 1 mock 22M Nov 19 15:00 nvidia-driver-cuda-libs-375.20-1.fc25.x86_64.rpm

Both packages contain just libraries, and they will be on your system as much as other libraries for multimedia codecs you don’t actually need. Example, with most multimedia programs you will get Xvid libraries for opening Xvid files, even though the format is pretty much abandoned. Having them installed does not enable any unwanted feature in your system. Also, NPP libraries should decrease 50% in size in one of the next CUDA updates, being the monolithic version of the library being deprecated in favor of split functionality.

There are some patches being evaluated to make those libraries loadable at runtime, but they have not been merged yet and there’s no guarantee that they ever will. Also, they are available for FFmpeg but not for all the other programs where support has been enabled for; so depending on your installation, you might get them anyway.

As of today, from the Multimedia repository the following programs have been enabled with some Nvidia hardware enablement:

  • MPV (video decoding through CUVID)
  • FFmpeg (encoding through NVENC, decoding through CUVID and filtering through CUDA NPP)
  • Avidemux (encoding, through NVENC)
  • GStreamer (NVENC plugin)
  • Blender (GPU rendering)

VDPAU for decoding was already enabled where possible.
Of course anything that is using FFmpeg (like the GStreamer plugins) could theoretically benefit from the same enablements as in FFMpeg:

$ for i in encoders decoders filters; do
    echo $i:; ffmpeg -hide_banner -${i} | egrep -i "npp|cuvid|nvenc|cuda"
done
encoders:
 V..... h264_nvenc           NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
 V..... nvenc                NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
 V..... nvenc_h264           NVIDIA NVENC H.264 encoder (codec h264)
 V..... nvenc_hevc           NVIDIA NVENC hevc encoder (codec hevc)
 V..... hevc_nvenc           NVIDIA NVENC hevc encoder (codec hevc)
decoders:
 V..... h263_cuvid           Nvidia CUVID H263 decoder (codec h263)
 V..... h264_cuvid           Nvidia CUVID H264 decoder (codec h264)
 V..... hevc_cuvid           Nvidia CUVID HEVC decoder (codec hevc)
 V..... mjpeg_cuvid          Nvidia CUVID MJPEG decoder (codec mjpeg)
 V..... mpeg1_cuvid          Nvidia CUVID MPEG1VIDEO decoder (codec mpeg1video)
 V..... mpeg2_cuvid          Nvidia CUVID MPEG2VIDEO decoder (codec mpeg2video)
 V..... mpeg4_cuvid          Nvidia CUVID MPEG4 decoder (codec mpeg4)
 V..... vc1_cuvid            Nvidia CUVID VC1 decoder (codec vc1)
 V..... vp8_cuvid            Nvidia CUVID VP8 decoder (codec vp8)
 V..... vp9_cuvid            Nvidia CUVID VP9 decoder (codec vp9)
filters:
 ... hwupload_cuda     V->V       Upload a system memory frame to a CUDA device.
 ... scale_npp         V->V       NVIDIA Performance Primitives video scaling and format conversion

I think this will be much appreciated for you users out there that are already using CUDA for deep learning and FFMpeg to process data 🙂

Rebases: FFmpeg, HandBrake, VLC, OpenH264, WebP (CentOS/RHEL), MPV.

A note on Blender: Blender with CUDA support is still at 2.78 built with CUDA 7.5, and not 2.78a built with CUDA 8; so no Nvidia Pascal GPU support. I’m working on it.

GNOME Software integration

Most of the graphical software is now enabled in GNOME software for Fedora 25, meaning that you can search stuff with a keyword and that if you have the repository enabled it will just pop-up:

gnome-software-handbrake

gnome-software-makemkv

gnome-software-vlc

There is still some packages that need AppStream metadata, but that will come.

As usual, feedback, bugs and comments are welcome.

CUDA 8, cuDNN, Nvidia drivers and GNOME Software metadata

slaanesh 48 Comments

GNOME software integration

The Nvidia driver repository has been updated with AppStream metadata. From Fedora 25 onward, you will be able to search for Nvidia, CUDA, GeForce or Quadro to make the driver, control panel and other programs appear in the Gnome Software window.

As far as I know, this should be enabled by default on Fedora 25.

gnome-software-nvidia

Thanks to Richard Hughes for helping out with the metadata.

I require proper 16:10 aspect ratio pictures for both NSight and the Visual Profiler running on Fedora, so if you want to contribute just drop me an email or open an issue on the CUDA package on GitHub.

Changes to the Nvidia driver packaging

The Nvidia driver can now be installed without nvidia-settings (the control panel utility) as requested by Red Hat, in preparation for the Gnome software integration. This means the dependencies have been reversed, and that to install the driver and the control panel you need to install nvidia-settings or the driver and nvidia-settings:

dnf/yum -y install nvidia-settings kernel-devel

The libglvnd package has been updated to the latest snapshot and now features all the changes that have been introduced by Adam Jackson for the Mesa GLVND integration in Fedora 25. This means that while installing you will be prompted to install/upgrade smaller packages that contain a subset of the libglvnd libraries, this includes EGL support for the recently released beta drivers version 375.10. For anything lower than 375.10 (so Fedora 23-24 and CentOS/RHEL 6/7 at the moment of writing this) Nvidia’s last official note on EGL is:

“libEGL.so.1, while not a proper GLVND library, depends upon the GLVND infrastructure for proper functionality. Therefore, any driver package which aims to support NVIDIA EGL must provide the GLVND libraries […]”

So for now, in Fedora 23, 24 and CentOS/RHEL 6/7:

$ rpm -q --requires nvidia-driver-libs.x86_64 | grep libglvnd
libglvnd-gles(x86-64) >= 0.1.1
libglvnd-glx(x86-64) >= 0.1.1
libglvnd-opengl(x86-64) >= 0.1.1
$ rpm -q --conflicts nvidia-driver-libs.x86_64 | grep libglvnd
libglvnd-egl(x86-64) >= 0.1.1

And for Fedora 25:

$ rpm -q --requires nvidia-driver-libs.x86_64 | grep libglvnd
libglvnd-egl(x86-64) >= 0.2
libglvnd-gles(x86-64) >= 0.2
libglvnd-glx(x86-64) >= 0.2
libglvnd-opengl(x86-64) >= 0.2

Not a big deal. This accommodates the ongoing modularization in Mesa but still preserves the original EGL libraries from Nvidia. The upgrade should be transparent and you should not notice any difference except some smaller packages being installed.

vulkan_500px_june16Vulkan is now part of Fedora, so on supported Fedora releases, the Vulkan loader and libraries can be installed and you do not need to do anything to enable support in the drivers. CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux do not have Vulkan yet. I’m not sure if it’s worth installing it by default along with the drivers, though.

Let’s assume you have a freshly installed Fedora 25 system with a recent Nvidia GPU and you want to:

  • Install the driver for gaming
  • Play Vulkan enabled games
  • Want to be comfortable with the control panel
  • Play 32 bit games on a 64 bit system
  • Play 32 bit Vulkan games on a 64 bit system
$ sudo dnf install nvidia-settings kernel-devel dkms-nvidia vulkan.i686 nvidia-driver-libs.i686
Last metadata expiration check: 0:33:49 ago on Mon Oct 24 14:14:30 2016.
Dependencies resolved.
=====================================================================================
 Package            Arch   Version                             Repository       Size
=====================================================================================
Installing:
 dkms-nvidia        x86_64 2:375.10-1.fc25                     fedora-nvidia   6.4 M
 libglvnd           i686   1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia   103 k
 libglvnd           x86_64 1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia   105 k
 libglvnd-egl       i686   1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia    44 k
 libglvnd-egl       x86_64 1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia    42 k
 libglvnd-gles      i686   1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia    29 k
 libglvnd-gles      x86_64 1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia    28 k
 libglvnd-glx       i686   1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia   114 k
 libglvnd-glx       x86_64 1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia   110 k
 libglvnd-opengl    i686   1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia    39 k
 libglvnd-opengl    x86_64 1:0.2.999-4.20161025git28867bb.fc25 fedora-nvidia    38 k
 libva-vdpau-driver x86_64 0.7.4-14.fc24                       fedora           61 k
 libvdpau           i686   1.1.1-3.fc24                        fedora           35 k
 nvidia-driver      x86_64 2:375.10-3.fc25                     fedora-nvidia   3.1 M
 nvidia-driver-NVML x86_64 2:375.10-3.fc25                     fedora-nvidia   397 k
 nvidia-driver-libs i686   2:375.10-3.fc25                     fedora-nvidia    15 M
 nvidia-driver-libs x86_64 2:375.10-3.fc25                     fedora-nvidia    14 M
 nvidia-libXNVCtrl  x86_64 2:375.10-1.fc25                     fedora-nvidia    26 k
 nvidia-settings    x86_64 2:375.10-1.fc25                     fedora-nvidia   935 k
 vulkan             i686   1.0.30.0-1.fc25                     updates-testing 1.5 M
 vulkan-filesystem  noarch 1.0.30.0-1.fc25                     updates-testing 8.0 k

Transaction Summary
=====================================================================================
Install  21 Packages

Total download size: 42 M
Installed size: 178 M
Is this ok [y/N]:

Note that the requirement on kernel-devel is still required as otherwise the package kernel-debug-devel is pulled in automatically in place of the normal non-debug package. There is bug opened on dnf/libsolv for this.

Changes to CUDA packaging

The CUDA packages hosted on the Nvidia repository are split into multiple subpackages, based on the library. For each library, you have the corresponding devel subpackage with the headers, the unversioned library symlink and the static library. Here, they were divided in one libs, one big extra-libs, one static and one devel subpackage for everything. Since I’m planning to enable CUDA/NVCUVID encoding/decoding in FFmpeg (I’m actually waiting to the dynamic loader patches to land in the 3.2 branch before enabling that) there should be a way to install just what is required by those functions and not the whole CUDA toolkit set of libraries.

So now, all the libraries are split into subpackages, much like in the original Nvidia CUDA repository. This allows you to install and build software relying on specific components without the need to install all the CUDA toolkit just to satisfy a library dependency. With the new packaging organization, the original cuda-devel and cuda-extra-libs will pull in all the specific subpackages giving you the same situation you are accustomed to. Also, for the same reason, static libraries have been included in each respective devel subpackage.

Example, just with the basic tools:

$ sudo dnf install cuda
Last metadata expiration check: 0:00:20 ago on Sun Oct 23 13:11:01 2016.
Dependencies resolved.
================================================================================
 Package           Arch         Version               Repository           Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 cuda              x86_64       1:8.0.44-4.fc24       fedora-nvidia        95 M
 cuda-cufft        x86_64       1:8.0.44-4.fc24       fedora-nvidia        97 M
 cuda-curand       x86_64       1:8.0.44-4.fc24       fedora-nvidia        38 M
 cuda-libs         x86_64       1:8.0.44-4.fc24       fedora-nvidia       6.4 M

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install  4 Packages

Total size: 236 M
Installed size: 469 M
Is this ok [y/N]:

The basic tools along with all the libraries (note that the NVML headers are included):

$ sudo dnf install cuda-devel
Last metadata expiration check: 0:10:00 ago on Sun Oct 23 13:11:01 2016.
Dependencies resolved.
================================================================================
 Package                 Arch       Version             Repository         Size
================================================================================
Installing:
 cuda                    x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      95 M
 cuda-cublas             x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      21 M
 cuda-cublas-devel       x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      38 M
 cuda-cudart             x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     131 k
 cuda-cudart-devel       x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     659 k
 cuda-cufft              x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      97 M
 cuda-cufft-devel        x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      73 M
 cuda-cupti              x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     1.2 M
 cuda-cupti-devel        x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     213 k
 cuda-curand             x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      38 M
 cuda-curand-devel       x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      60 M
 cuda-cusolver           x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      23 M
 cuda-cusolver-devel     x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     4.1 M
 cuda-cusparse           x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      23 M
 cuda-cusparse-devel     x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      23 M
 cuda-devel              x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     1.6 M
 cuda-libs               x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     6.4 M
 cuda-npp                x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      91 M
 cuda-npp-devel          x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      47 M
 cuda-nvgraph            x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     4.6 M
 cuda-nvgraph-devel      x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      12 k
 cuda-nvml-devel         x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      41 k
 cuda-nvrtc              x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia     6.6 M
 cuda-nvrtc-devel        x86_64     1:8.0.44-4.fc24     fedora-nvidia      16 k

Transaction Summary
================================================================================
Install  24 Packages

Total size: 655 M
Installed size: 1.4 G
Is this ok [y/N]:

The nvidia-driver-NVML-devel package, which was including the NVML header (for libnvidia-ml.so) has now been made obsolete by the new headers, which are now part of CUDA 8. So the cuda-nvml-devel package will take care of that. Again, this is the same as in the Nvidia repository. Everything that was requiring the NVML header now refers to that package instead of the previous one. I will leave it for a few releases like that and then I will remove the Obsolete/Provides tags from the various SPEC files.

The header is also required for building the latest nvidia-settings from the 375.10 source, this has been taken into account making the CUDA package buildable on i686 but generating only the cuda-nvml-devel subpackage.

Extra stuff

In addition to the libraries bundled in the CUDA toolkit, also the cuDNN library for distributed neural networks is included in the repository.

As usual, you are welcome to open bugs / request stuff / comment on the GitHub repositories.

GStreamer plugins for CentOS/RHEL 7, MPV and Fedora 25 repositories

slaanesh 7 Comments

The Multimedia repository now provides GStreamer (1.0) plugins for Bad, Ugly, libAV and VA-API plugin bundles with all options enabled for CentOS/RHEL 7. As per the Fedora ones, these are split into the following GStreamer runtime packages:

  • gstreamer1-plugins-bad
  • gstreamer1-plugins-ugly
  • gstreamer1-plugins-vaapi
  • gstreamer1-plugins-libav
  • gstreamer1-plugins-bad-fluidsynth (pulls in the whole FluidSynth distribution)

They all have an Epoch of “1”, to avoid any upgrade issue. Like for FFMpeg, I’ve tried to enable all the supported plugins out of the box. The “bad” package actually obsoletes the “bad-free”, “bad-nonfree” and “openh264” Gstreamer plugin packages. As such, they play nicely when enabling OpenH264 support on Firefox.

Apart from this, 99% of the Fedora 25 packages are now available, Fedora 24 and Fedora 25 repositories now have MPV in them.

Next steps

Next steps:

OpenH264 Firefox support

slaanesh 8 Comments

Fedora 24 has a new repository to enable OpenH264 decoding in Mozilla Firefox by enabling a specific repository. As described in the Wiki page, this is already available on newly installed systems.

As part of the packages contained in the Multimedia repository, there is also OpenH264 and support for it in both FFMpeg and Gstreamer Plugins. These packages conflict with the packages provided in the OpenH264 repository, so I’m now providing a custom build of the Mozilla integration along with FFMpeg and Gstreamer packages. This is due to the fact that:

  • I’m providing a more recent OpenH264 Gstreamer plugin as part of the “bad” package
  • I use slightly different names for the OpenH264 packages themselves
  • I’m providing Firefox H264 support also for CentOS and Red Hat Enterprise Linux

These new packages are already available now along with other small updates in other packages; so to install OpenH264 support for Firefox:

dnf/yum install mozilla-openh264

This work is also part of the Fedora 25 (rawhide) packages that I plan to publish next week (as time permits…) which will include OpenH264 1.6 and an FFMpeg with support for it along with other Nvidia enablements. FFMpeg support is finally for both encoding and decoding.

Plex Media Server on Fedora 24 weird SELinux issue

slaanesh 10 Comments

Recently I upgraded my Plex Media Server from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24, and upon restart my Plex Media Server service was not starting.

After digging around a bit, I discovered that with SELinux in enforcing mode the service would not start (exiting with code “127”).

The only error I could find was a message saying that the Plex Media Server binary was not able to load some required library when SELinux was enabled. Funny thing is, that there is no AVC denial error in the audit logs. Also, reloading the Plex Media Server bundled SELinux policy or relabeling the filesystem did not help.

After fiddling around a bit, I discovered that I had to move the LD_LIBRARY_PATH declaration from the Environment to the ExecStart line, otherwise with the system in SELinux Enforcing mode the line is basically ignored and the server does not start:

--- plexmediaserver.service.orig	2016-06-19 21:47:57.793407813 +0200
+++ plexmediaserver.service	2016-06-19 21:48:16.984683363 +0200
@@ -7,11 +7,10 @@
 Environment=PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_HOME=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver
 Environment=PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_MAX_PLUGIN_PROCS=6
 Environment=PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_TMPDIR=/tmp
-Environment=LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver
 Environment=LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
 Environment=LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 ExecStartPre=/bin/sh -c '/usr/bin/test -d "${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}" || /bin/mkdir -p "${PLEX_MEDIA_SERVER_APPLICATION_SUPPORT_DIR}"'
-ExecStart=/bin/sh -c '/usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Server'
+ExecStart=/bin/sh -c 'LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/plexmediaserver /usr/lib/plexmediaserver/Plex\ Media\ Server'
 Type=simple
 User=plex
 Group=plex

I don’t even know how to report this bug, does anyone have an idea about it and why does this happen? Is it related to some sort of SELinux boolean?

Fedora 24 and CentOS/RHEL 7 repositories

slaanesh 23 Comments

Fedora 24 repositories have been available for quite some time now, but here is the official statement that everything should be supported out of the box.

As part of the repository availability, I would like to say that starting from Fedora 24, the repositories are self-sustained and do not require RPMFusion to be enabled. I try to preserve compatibility between the two, so if you step into any problem just open an issue to the specific package on Github, send me an email or drop a message in the comment section of the various pages. Please note that “compatible” means that actually you shouldn’t get any conflict when installing packages, and not that I will not overwrite/obsolete the packages provided in the other repositories.

CentOS/RHEL 7 repositories have been available stand alone since the beginning and do not require external repositories to be enabled. Again, if an RPMFusion (or whatever will be mainstream at the moment) CentOS/RHEL 7 repository will appear, I will try to be compatible with it.

Scope of support

My basic idea is to have what I’m using normally everyday as a package in Fedora, enabling software combinations that would be otherwise impossible to distribute in official repositories due to license/patent issues. This for example includes NVENC (Nvidia Encoder) FFMPeg enabled builds that I use almost everyday.

Being a daily CentOS/RHEL 7 user I also want to support the latest and gretest of the same software on that platform, which also means rebuilding some official CentOS/RHEL 7 packages like VP8/9, VDPAU and VA-API libraries.

Due to the various package builds being different (or simply containing newer software releases) from what the other repositories offer, I also try to be completely independent, you can basically install the operating system and just use my repositories.

Build system changes

The (internal at the moment) build system uses Github as its primary system for storing the package information. There is a Negativo17.org public organization where all the work goes, so if you want to look at the development or the SPEC files, just browse to Github. If you have an issue or proposed change as well, you’re welcome to open an issue or create a merge request in the specific package Git page.

Skype Web Pidgin plugin

skype

The Skype repository used to contain purple-skype for Fedora and CentOS/RHEL distributions which at the time required an installed Skype to work. Now, I helped a new Fedora contributor into integrating the newly developed Skype web plugin, which is based on the Skype web client. The package in Fedora obsoletes and provides correctly the skype4pidgin plugin and as such I don’t need to provide anything else in the repository.

The installation instructions have been updated to reflect this.

Skype is available only in 32 bit format, so on a 64 bit a 32 bit client will always be installed. Since the merging with MSN, the HTML welcome screen requires a 32 bit WebKit GTK build to start. This is not included in the 64 bit only CentOS/RHEL 7 repositories; so for this reason, if you are running CentOS/RHEL 7, it requires the multimedia repository to be enabled and have the dependency solved. This used to be self-contained in the Skype repository, but this is no longer feasible for me to mantain considering there is a different rebuild of WebKit GTK in the Multimedia repository.

Spotify Client

spotify-client

The Spotify repository used to contain FFMpeg for CentOS/RHEL distributions and a requirement on FFMpeg’s RPMFusion as a Fedora dependency. FFMpeg is no longer included in the CentOS/RHEL 7 repositories so the multimedia repository has to be enabled to have the dependency solved. As for Skype, this no longer feasible for me to mantain considering there is a different rebuild of WebKit GTK in the Multimedia repository.

Here as well the installation instructions have been updated to reflect the change.

aKMOD kernel module packages

The kernel binary module packages generated by aKMOD are now compressed with XZ, like in the original Fedora kernel packages that contain kernel modules. I’ve become a DKMS contributor, so, as time permits, I will add the same functionality to DKMS for Fedora distributions.

At the moment, this applies to Nvidia and X-Pad kernel modules.

Gstreamer plugins and multimedia libraries

The Multimedia repository now provides GStreamer (1.0) plugins for Bad, Ugly, libAV and VA-API plugin bundles with all options enabled. This is split into the following GStreamer runtime packages:

  • gstreamer1-plugins-bad
  • gstreamer1-plugins-ugly
  • gstreamer1-vaapi
  • gstreamer1-libav
  • gstreamer1-plugins-bad-fluidsynth (pulls in the whole FluidSynth distribution)
  • gstreamer1-plugins-bad-nvenc (x86_64 only, pulls in the Nvidia binary driver; and at the moment it does not work properly)

They all have an Epoch of “1”, due to the various reasons explained at the top. They are not yet available for CentOS/RHEL 7 due to time constraints; I will try to prepare them in the next weeks.

Fedora 24 OpenH264 repository

A note on the Fedora 24 OpenH264 repository. As described in its wiki page, there is an extra repository that can be enabled directly in Fedora 24 that allows you to install OpenH264, its relevant Gstreamer 1.0 plugin and a Mozilla plugin for Firefox. Following the same logic, at the moment the same Gstreamer 1.0 plugin is provided/obsoleted (in newer form) by the gstreamer1-pluings-bad package. There is a conflict for the OpenH264 binaries which I will address soon.

Updated multimedia and Nvidia driver packages

slaanesh 27 Comments

As many of you have noticed, there are big updates pushed in the repositories. Merging all of them into one big repository is still ongoing; but as part of it all builds now come from these git repositories:

https://github.com/negativo17

Feel free to create merge requests or ask access to them.

VLC

Both Fedora 23 and RHEL / CentOS 7 packages now host VLC with all plugins enabled, so this means you can listen/watch any kind of multimedia file on both distributions. Obligatory screenshot (CentOS 7):

centos-vlc

Of course you can also play Blu-Ray discs with it.

Gstreamer “bad” plugins

Fedora contains also Gstreamer “bad” plugins with all possible options enabled. Some statistics:

$ gst-inspect-1.0 | grep Total
Total count: 227 plugins, 1483 features

Packages for both “ugly” and “bad” plugins are coming for CentOS/RHEL 7 as well.

Updated multimedia packages

Also the update brings in quite a few updates on multimedia libraries (live555, FFMpeg, x265, dcadec, etc.).

Fedora 24 support

Fedora 24 support is coming, most of the packages have been rebuilt and all repositories will be available before the release. Starting from Fedora 24, you can enable all repositories with or without RPMFusion being enabled. This means I will try to maintain compatibility but you will not require to enable it.

Nvidia driver

The Nvidia driver has been updated to 364.19 on all supported Fedora releases. This brings in mode setting for the nvidia-drm module and Vulkan support. In the current state, mode setting works only in conjunction with a custom Wayland and the module does not provide an fb driver for the console. The Wayland patches have not been merged (and is not going very well on this side) and a KMS console is not there; so basically even enabling it just brings absolutely no difference to your experience. As such, modesetting is disabled.

It also brings instability to both my systems, so I guess it needs to mature some more before being usable. To enable mode setting, perform the following changes:

# echo "options nvidia-drm modeset=1" > /etc/depmod.d/nvidia.conf
# depmod -a
# reboot

To be more precise, some kernel command should be removed when the kernel module gets also a fb driver:

# grubby --update-kernel=ALL --remove-args='nomodeset gfxpayload=vga=normal'
# sed -i -e 's/nomodeset gfxpayload=vga=normal //g' /etc/default/grub

At the moment, those parameters are still added by the package as there is absolutely no benefit in enabling mode setting. As I said, you will reboot and get absolutely no difference.

As usual, let me know of any problems. I will be away for holiday for 3 weeks, so do not expect a prompt reply!

Support for 8/10/12 bit color depths in HandBrake!

slaanesh 14 Comments

HandBrake is now using a freshly built x265 library that enables full color depth support at 8, 10 and 12 bits. You can now convert videos in these format! This has been enabled in the 64 bit builds of the x265 library; for both Fedora 23 and CentOS/RHEL 7.

Also, NUMA support has been added to the libraries. Just by chance I have an SGI UV 200 (the predecessor of the current SGI UV 300) lying around.

ghb-x265

This goes along with the 10 bit support for x264 that was enabled some time ago; so I’ve made some adjustments to the libraries and now there is more consistency between x264/x265. Both are loaded at runtime by HandBrake:

$ ls -alghs /usr/lib64/libx26*
668K -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root 667K Feb  5 09:55 /usr/lib64/libx264_main10.so
764K -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root 763K Feb  5 09:55 /usr/lib64/libx264.so.148
3.4M -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root 3.4M Feb  5 09:05 /usr/lib64/libx265_main10.so
3.4M -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root 3.4M Feb  5 09:05 /usr/lib64/libx265_main12.so
3.2M -rwxr-xr-x. 1 root 3.2M Feb  5 09:05 /usr/lib64/libx265.so.68

Input devices in Steam Big Picture mode

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I’ve just updated the the Steam package to fix input detection of some device in Big Picture mode. The package comes now with some additional configuration files for input devices, to have them properly recognized and functioning in Big Picture mode. Check below for the complete list of input device configurations that have been added:

Configuration for the following devices is part of the original Steam tarball:

  • Steam Controller with USB adapter
  • HTC Vive HID Sensor with USB adapter

Detection for the following device has been modified to make it appear as a Game Pad and not as a mouse (due to its touchpad). This prevents the “ghost” keypresses in Steam Big Picture mode:

  • Nvidia Shield Controller with USB cable

Detection for the following device has been modified to have them properly detected as mice/keyboards and not joysticks due to a bug in the Linux kernel. This prevents the “ghost” keypresses in Steam Big Picture mode:

  • Microsoft Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop® 2.10
  • Microsoft Wireless Desktop – Comfort Edition
  • Microsoft Microsoft® Digital Media Pro Keyboard
  • Microsoft Corp. Digital Media Pro Keyboard
  • Microsoft Microsoft® Digital Media Keyboard
  • Microsoft Corp. Digital Media Keyboard 1.0A
  • Microsoft Microsoft® Digital Media Keyboard 3000
  • Microsoft Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v6.0
  • Microsoft Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v8.0
  • Microsoft Corp. Nano Transceiver v1.0 for Bluetooth
  • Microsoft Wireless Mobile Mouse 1000
  • Microsoft Wireless Desktop 3000
  • Microsoft® SideWinder(TM) 2.4GHz Transceiver
  • Microsoft Corp. Wired Keyboard 600
  • Microsoft Corp. Sidewinder X4 keyboard
  • Microsoft® 2.4GHz Transceiver v9.0
  • Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.1
  • Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard (5KV-00001)
  • Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v1.0
  • Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 800
  • Microsoft® Nano Transceiver v2.0
  • WACOM CTE-640-U V4.0-3
  • Wacom Co., Ltd Graphire 4 6×8
  • Wacom Bamboo Pen and Touch CTH-460
  • A4 Tech Co., G7 750 mouse
  • A4 Tech Co., Ltd Bloody TL80 Terminator Laser Gaming Mouse
  • A4 Tech Co., Ltd Bloody RT7 Terminator Wireless
  • Modecom MC-5006 Keyboard
  • A4 Tech Co., Ltd Terminator TL9 Laser Gaming Mouse
  • A4 Tech Co., Ltd Bloody V5
  • A4 Tech Co., Ltd Bloody R3 mouse
  • A4 Tech Co., Ltd X-718BK Oscar Optical Gaming Mouse
  • A4 Tech Co., Ltd XL-750BK Laser Mouse
  • A4 Tech Co., Sharkoon Fireglider Optical
  • Cooler Master Storm Mizar Mouse

The relevant repository page has been updated accordingly. If you have any additional misbehaving device that does not currently work properly in Steam Big Picture mode, just contact me and I will try to add the device defnitions to the upstream repositories.