Plex has been transcoding in software on hardware that can do it in the iGPU. This
opts its ServiceDefinition into the `hardware` capability from #27 and re-renders.
catalog/plex.yaml gains four lines of YAML and the comment that explains them:
hardware:
gpu: intel-quicksync
which renders exactly two things into apps/wave-0/plex.yaml and nothing else — a
`dri` hostPath volume (/dev/dri, type: DirectoryOrCreate) and a read-write /dev/dri
volumeMount on the app container. Whole-tree render diff: 6 added lines, one file.
The comment records what is not obvious from the four lines: the device exists on
ALL THREE prod nodes with i915 bound (so no nodeSelector is rendered and none is
wanted); why `supplementalGroups` would be INERT rather than a hardening (the
image's cont-init hook adds the plex user to the device's group inside the
container, and s6-setuidgid then REPLACES the process group list from /etc/group,
discarding anything Kubernetes supplied); and why `DirectoryOrCreate` is
load-bearing (apps-wave-0 is wait:true with apps-wave-1 depending on it, so a
failed mount would stall the whole app tier for a feature that is not).
THE FEATURE IS INERT UNTIL A HUMAN CLICKS A BOX, and that is the part this commit
is really about. Mounting the device does not enable hardware transcoding; Plex's
`HardwareAcceleratedCodecs` preference does, and it is ABSENT from Preferences.xml
— the toggle has never been on. It cannot be automated: a bounded grep across the
running image's entire init surface (/etc/cont-init.d, /etc/services.d,
/etc/fix-attrs.d, /plex-common.sh, /usr/local/bin) found ZERO PLEX_PREFERENCE*
support, and the six setPref keys the image does write are all unrelated. So
runbooks/plex-quicksync.md is the procedure, registered in the configMapGenerator
(a runbook in git with no generator entry is reviewed, merged, and still a 404) and
indexed in runbooks/README.md. It covers the GitOps/manual boundary, the toggle and
the real preference keys (including the widely-cited one that does not exist and
the upstream misspelling nobody should "fix"), verification via `Transcode (hw)` on
the Plex dashboard — stated plainly as the ONLY proof, because Plex renders no
ServiceMonitor and an alert could never fire — the device-cgroup failure to expect
first with its Intel-device-plugin fallback, and the floating-`:latest` caveat.
Stacked on #27 (feat/sd-hardware-capability), which is open and unmerged; that
branch's commit is in this range by design and this must merge after it.
NOT VERIFIED, and the handoff says so at length: hardware transcoding has not been
observed working. Whether containerd's device cgroup lets a non-privileged pod
open() a bind-mounted char device is an open question that only deploying settles,
and the Plex-side toggle was still unset at the time of writing. A green gate
proves the manifest renders; it proves nothing about transcoding.
Gate (pinned toolbox, worktree): rc 3 — UNDETERMINED, not green. Passed:
decisions-log, lint, l0, render-golden, l1, approval-policy. Skipped (the known
local ceiling): spec-immutability (no sibling spec repo), gitea-settings (no
SETTINGS_API_TOKEN), conformance (CLUSTER_AVAILABLE unset, so L2/L3 did not run).
No fourth skip, nothing failed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <[email protected]>
