@MowMdown Okay, stupid question.... How did you do that?

Just now, cjlmediasolutions said:

@MowMdown Okay, stupid question.... How did you do that?

You will want to be on the 7.3.0 beta at a minimum as the 6.12 kernel 7.2.X uses doesnt have full Xe support and wont work with Intel Arc GPUs

Open terminal and type in lspci -nn | grep VGA you should get an output similar to 2a:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Intel Corporation DG2 [Arc A310] [8086:56a6] (rev 05)

Note down the [8086:56a6] the important piece is the right side of the : the 56a6 in my case your will be different

Then go to Tools > System Drivers and scroll down to the i915 driver, click the little pencil and type in options i915 force_probe=!56a6 then srcoll down to Xe and type in options xe force_probe=56a6

remember to replace 56a6 from my example with your own value from the lspci command and then click the save icon.

Edited April 11Apr 11 by MowMdown

@MowMdown Ah - right id need to be in 7.3 which I can't upgrade yet because my Unleashed sub ended but getting lifetime soon. If I don't resolve this by then I may try the xe driver. Not sure what to do next but to try and rule out transcoding I turned it off on Plex completely and I'm using software transcode to see if it still freezes. It's my main lead at the moment lol. The GPU appears to hang. Two concurrent Plex VAAPI sessions on the iGPU triggered i915 kernel stall right before the freeze from what I can tell. CPU was only at 20%, brief iowait spike, then complete hard lock with no panic or OOM. Kernel just stops responding waiting for the GPU. So idk... It's pointing to hw transcoding/GPU.

8 minutes ago, cjlmediasolutions said:

@MowMdown Ah - right id need to be in 7.3 which I can't upgrade yet because my Unleashed sub ended but getting lifetime soon. If I don't resolve this by then I may try the xe driver. Not sure what to do next but to try and rule out transcoding I turned it off on Plex completely and I'm using software transcode to see if it still freezes. It's my main lead at the moment lol. The GPU appears to hang. Two concurrent Plex VAAPI sessions on the iGPU triggered i915 kernel stall right before the freeze from what I can tell. CPU was only at 20%, brief iowait spike, then complete hard lock with no panic or OOM. Kernel just stops responding waiting for the GPU. So idk... It's pointing to hw transcoding/GPU.

Have you ruled out the plugins youre using? I see corefreq and other system performance altering plugins, I would run in safe mode and only plex, and see if you can replicate the issue. You need to try and limit variables.

6 minutes ago, MowMdown said:

Have you ruled out the plugins youre using? I see corefreq and other system performance altering plugins, I would run in safe mode and only plex, and see if you can replicate the issue. You need to try and limit variables.

I haven't yet because it's a slow process lol. But that's on the list, yes! My next steps atm are:

• Run the server with HW transcoding on Plex turned off. If it doesn't freeze this may be the issue.

• If it does crash, check my logs. Depending on what they say I'll pivot from there.

• If no logs, I'll boot into Safe Mode and run Plex only.

To cover all bases I also opened an RMA with my PSU manufacturer to see if they can send me a new one. Hard to prove it's a PSU but I basically said that I'm trying to rule everything out and the symptoms could be power.

Update: I turned off Hardware Transcoding a week ago and it hasn't crashed since. This isn't necessarily conclusive because it's possible there's a race condition and this is coincidental, however, it seems likely that transcoding is the cause.

Edited April 16Apr 16 by cjlmediasolutions