[RndTbl] intel-media-driver with Intel 1165G7 and Rocky 9

Sat Feb 18 10:27:14 CST 2023

You’re not seeing any results because that’s not a kernel module.  It’s also not an Intel video driver at all – see below.
There is no newer/better intel video driver than what your distro provides – Intel is 100% explicitly clear about that.  The official driver is whatever comes with the kernel, period.  See How to Identify & Find Graphics Drivers for Linux* (intel.com)<https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005520/graphics.html>.
The only supported way to get an updated Intel video device driver is to upgrade to a newer Linux kernel.  The device driver is bundled with the kernel, and is version-locked to the kernel.

iHD_drv_video is not a newer/better device driver for Intel video cards, it’s the Intel VAAPI driver, only used for video encoding and decoding and a handful of other acceleration tasks.  (GitHub - intel/media-driver<https://github.com/intel/media-driver>)    There’s a similar driver for (I think) older chips, GitHub - intel/intel-vaapi-driver: VA-API user mode driver for Intel GEN Graphics family<https://github.com/intel/intel-vaapi-driver>.
The distro-provided, kernel-bundled, i915 Kernel DRI driver will continue to be used for everything that isn’t a VAAPI function.  (There are plenty of other acceleration tasks the i915 driver handles on its, own, I don’t really understand why VAAPI has to be a separate thing that can’t be bundled into i915.ko, maybe it’s a licensing issue?)

The test to see if the VAAPI driver is now functioning is to run the vainfo(1) tool.  (On Debian, it’s contained in the “vainfo” package.)  While Ubuntu-specific, this page describes checking for VAAPI support in more details: Enable Hardware Video Acceleration (VA-API) For Firefox in Ubuntu 20.04 / 18.04 & Higher | UbuntuHandbook<https://ubuntuhandbook.org/index.php/2021/08/enable-hardware-video-acceleration-va-api-for-firefox-in-ubuntu-20-04-18-04-higher/>.  More VAAPI links are at vaapi (www.freedesktop.org)<https://www.freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/vaapi/>.

Anything with an inefficient or slow H.264 implementation (how would this even happen in 2023???) could benefit from VAAPI acceleration, whether encoding, decoding, or transcoding.  I’m not sure what else it could accomplish for you.  Also remember that Intel accelerated video functions can sometimes be, even when they’re slightly faster, more power-hungry and heat-producing than the equivalent optimized CPU code – so in laptops or fanless builds, you’re probably better off not using VAAPI at all.

Not very much uses VAAPI – mostly just video tools, including video players, and they have to be built with VAAPI support.  One would hope that there’s a decent amount of widget re-use by now, and that e.g. your system-default video player could make use of this capability without any special configuration, but that’s far from guaranteed.  VLC, naturally, supports VAAPI, but they note that using it can be worse than not using it (VLC VAAPI - VideoLAN Wiki<https://wiki.videolan.org/VLC_VAAPI/>); other playback tools may not have the same problem.
VAAPI just uses a different set of transistors to accomplish exactly the same task your CPU would normally do in “software”.  If you don’t do H.264 playback or recording, VAAPI is probably pointless for you.

The other instructions at RPMFusion’s Multimedia page may be somewhat useful, they add support for a variety of other codecs that your system (excluding VLC, as always…) might not currently support.  If you don’t have a legacy collection of files that you can’t currently play, following these instructions isn’t going to change anything for you.  I take issue with the last item on that page: randomly installing firmware packages from untrusted 3rd-party repos might improve some aspect of your system, or might break it completely instead – make sure you know how to back out that change using an emergency boot disk before running that command!

I hate that I have to say this, but you probably don’t want to enable RPMFusion on any corporate system without checking with your company’s lawyer(s), or at least VP-level responsible people, first.  Their entire existence is founded on shipping RPMs that Red Hat & the Fedora Project (mostly) *can’t* legally or technically include, not *don’t want to* -  IMHO that’s a very serious misrepresentation by the RPMFusion project.  As a personal user, I loved that there was a source of precompiled packages that followed RMS’ “software wants to be free” ideology, but as a corporate user, it’s… not necessarily toxic, but for sure problematic/questionable.  This is totally a YMMV area – you may work for a small org. that has no chance of ever being on anyone’s target list and therefore doesn’t care, or you might work for some high-profile org. that needs to remain utterly beyond reproach at all times in all things: YMMV, as I said.

-Adam

From: Roundtable <roundtable-bounces at muug.ca> On Behalf Of Chris Audet
Sent: Saturday, February 18, 2023 9:33 AM
To: Trevor Cordes <trevor at tecnopolis.ca>
Cc: Continuation of Round Table discussion <roundtable at muug.ca>
Subject: Re: [RndTbl] intel-media-driver with Intel 1165G7 and Rocky 9

>Forget GUI tools, GUIs suck
Based 💪

Judging on the results from this kb<https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/support/articles/000005520/graphics.html> the DRM driver appears to be loaded:

bash-5.1$ lspci -k | grep -EA3 'VGA|3D|Display'
0000:00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] (rev 01)
Subsystem: Lenovo Device 3f19
Kernel driver in use: i915
Kernel modules: i915

For completeness, here are the results from the suggested commands.  I think I'm missing some of the expected output (possibly because this PC uses Wayland)?  I tried to grep for 46, intel, and 2c2141cd33dfa6e4d8f1ad9fdc6cd2d1d380c7.

bash-5.1$ rpm -ql intel-media-driver-21.1.3-1.el9.x86_64
/usr/lib/.build-id
/usr/lib/.build-id/46
/usr/lib/.build-id/46/2c2141cd33dfa6e4d8f1ad9fdc6cd2d1d380c7
/usr/lib64/dri/iHD_drv_video.so
/usr/share/doc/intel-media-driver
/usr/share/doc/intel-media-driver/README.md
/usr/share/licenses/intel-media-driver
/usr/share/licenses/intel-media-driver/LICENSE.md
/usr/share/metainfo/intel-media-driver.metainfo.xml

bash-5.1$ lsmod | grep i915
i915                 3321856  21
i2c_algo_bit           16384  1 i915
intel_gtt              24576  1 i915
drm_buddy              20480  1 i915
drm_dp_helper         159744  1 i915
drm_kms_helper        200704  2 drm_dp_helper,i915
cec                    53248  2 drm_dp_helper,i915
ttm                    86016  1 i915
drm                   622592  14 drm_dp_helper,drm_kms_helper,drm_buddy,i915,ttm
video                  57344  2 ideapad_laptop,i915

On Wed, Feb 15, 2023 at 9:38 PM Trevor Cordes <trevor at tecnopolis.ca<mailto:trevor at tecnopolis.ca>> wrote:
On 2023-02-15 Chris Audet wrote:
> [root at what ~]# dnf install intel-media-driver
> Last metadata expiration check: 2:11:34 ago on Wed 15 Feb 2023
> 03:49:21 PM. Package intel-media-driver-21.1.3-1.el9.x86_64 is

rpm -ql intel-media-driver-21.1.3-1.el9.x86_64 |grep ko.xz

take the string between the last / and the ko.xz and do:

lsmod |grep inteldrivermodname

(change inteldrivermodname to the string)

If you get output, it's loaded, and likely being used.

If you want to see if it's really being used and have some fun (read:
crash your video) then try

rmmod inteldrivermodname

(ugly but it shoudn't foobar your fs's or anything... can likely ssh
into the box to reboot properly, or use magic-sys-rq keys)

Forget GUI tools, GUIs suck!  :-)
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