As part of my Homelab, I have TrueNAS Community Edition running in a big case with a bunch of Frankenstein parts including two GTX 1080s. TrueNAS recently phased out support for these older cards and I’ve been having to go through and manually install working drivers, which seem to have gotten overwritten on the last update anyway. Since I’m not actually using anything for video output (and have onboard HDMI if needed). One of the cards I am passing through to a VM (where it has no problem being recognized and used). The other card was used by Truenas for my apps.
Do you have any recommendations for hardware to accelerate tasks like Immich, Jellfin transcoding, media fingerprinting for metadata, OCR on bulk-uploaded pdfs etc.?
I was never really a hardware guy, especially when it comes to self-hosting and servers.
- I don’t want to play games on my server.
- I don’t want to empty my accounts to put a 5090 TI in a server.
- The above tasks are too slow on CPU alone, so I have to put something in it.
- I could keep running the 1080s with manually installed drivers, but it’s a PITA and I wouldn’t mind not doing that.
Are there reasonable options that can take up the workload, but come in at a decent price point? I know with a server, I don’t necessarily have to run the same stuff as gamers. Are there options outside of the typical NVIDIA and AMD gaming linups that would work for my purpose, perhaps acquirable via FB marketplace, Craigslist, etc.? Does your server have video acceleration and, if so, what hardware are you using?
I appreciate any guidance the community can give me.
What does it mean that TrueNAS phased out support? Does that mean the proprietary drivers dropped support, and your TrueNAS is using those? Can you switch to open drivers?
The NVIDIA 50-series Blackwell cards require the use of the new open GPU kernel module, but several of NVIDIA’s older generations of GPUs - including the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta generations - lack the GPU System Processor (GSP) module on their silicon in order to leverage the open kernel module, and thus will no longer function. This includes the GTX 700-series, 900-GTX series, GTX 10-series, the Quadro M-series and P-series, and Tesla M-series and P-series cards.Here’s the detail. Sounds like the support for the new cards messed up the old cards, but it sounds like they might be working on a comparability fix. I use open drivers on some other systems. I don’t remember why I didn’t consider that a option here. This server has lived many lives and it’s mission continues to change and refocus all the time. Thanks for the reply.
Ah I see. Yeah, seems like, of all the reasons to need to upgrade your GPU, Linux dropping support shouldn’t be one.
Yeah. It’s soo BS. I sold my 1080s because pytorch and other libs started dropping support. And I just don’t have the resources to do custom build my software.