Problem/Justification
(What is the problem you are trying to solve with this feature/improvement or why should it be considered?)
A lot of people use TrueNAS Scale for streaming media and use ARC GPUs to transcode.
Currently there is no way I’d know of to monitor fan speed and temperature.
Fan control for these is very wonky so it would be beneficial to be able to monitor fan speed and gpu temperature.
Impact
(How is this feature going to impact all TrueNAS users? What are the benefits and advantages? Are there disadvantages?)
It would not affect all TrueNAS users. Just the ones using their NASes for streaming media, although there are a lot of those.
It would make monitoring these excellent transcoding GPUs much easier.
User Story
(Please give a short description on how you envision some user taking advantage of this feature, what are the steps a user will follow to accomplish it)
I would personally be able to try and create a custom cooling solution for my Sparkle A310 Eco. I have not yet tried it because I would not be able to control the fan based on GPU temperature without knowing it.
A patch was added to the i915 driver quite recently.
It would have to be backported and integrated into the TrueNAS Scale kernel.
I wholly understand if this feature request is dismissed, as transcoding is not one of the primary uses of a TrueNAS system and the use to enterprise customers would likely be null. I still think a lot of users would benefit from this and hope, this may be considered.
Fan speed monitoring (not control) should show up in kernel 6.12, which is hoping to be included in Fangtooth (25.04) but this is an additional feature ask.
That‘s nice to know.
I couldn‘t find kernel version yet on the fangtooth release page.
Temperature sensing would be way more important for my specific usecase though.
that’s also great to hear, I’m excited what’s coming with 25.04.
24.10 was probably the most useful update for me since I started using TrueNAS (or rather FreeNAS back then).
I’m just curious: I see you have a Ryzen Pro 4650G APU, which is exactly the same as my system. I’m just using the built-in iGPU for transcoding, and it seems to work fine (in fact, this was exactly why I got this CPU in the first place, so I wouldn’t need an external GPU and could also use ECC memory). Why did you add an extra GPU card?
Tone mapping for HDR content, (arguably) higher quality transcoding, ability to simultaneously transcode more streams, more support for various codecs (ie: av1), have budget & want to fill up available pcie slots, etc
As @Fleshmauler said: HDR tonemapping, AV1 and overall speed but most importantly: the iGPU couldn‘t be properly forwarded to my Ubuntu VM which I used before TrueNAS could properly handle a docker stack by itself.
I see, thanks for the reply. Out of curiosity, do you have any idea what the idle power draw on that Intel GPU card is?
Personally, I haven’t had to deal with AV1 video much yet (maybe it’ll be an issue in the future though), but the HDR tonemapping could become an issue, I’m not sure yet.
