Cant see a PCIe TV Tuner in TrueNAS Scale - Tvheadend

[Johev]

Dear Truenas scale community,

I am coming to you again for some advice :).

I have tried using my TrueNAS Scale to also serve some Satellite TV channels for the household.

Specs:
X10SL7-F
Xeon E3-1265Lv3
32GB ECC RAM

Tuner card: Digital Devices DVB-S2 V7 Advanced (https://digitaldevices.de/en/products/dvb-components/cine-s2-v7/)
Github Linux latest driver for compilation: https://github.com/DigitalDevices/dddvb/releases/tag/0.9.39



The PCIe card is the Digital Devices DVB-S2 V7A. I have checked and the tuner driver should be part of the Linux Kernel. The list here shows the DigitalDevices CineS2 DVB-S2 V7 Dual Tuner (https://www.linuxtv.org/wiki/index.php/DVB-S2_PCIe_Cards).

My questions are:
1) Is there a way in TrueNAS Scale, to check if the card is correctly recognised and the drivers are working well?
2) Is there a way to passthrough the PCIe TV Tuner card to the docker and install the drivers there?

Many thanks in advance for all your help.

 

[Fleshmauler]

in the shell; lspci to see if device is detected at all, lspci -k to see what (if any) drivers are present. Then checking if the drivers are 'working well' would then best be done by trying to do the needful; if it doesn't function the way you need it to, who cares if any other checks confirm drivers are 'working well'.

I'm 95% certain that if drivers aren't present on the OS hosting the docker then the device won't work on the docker. However, you could passthrough the device to a VM, install the drivers on the VM, then have your VM host the docker in question with now a working tuner. There your considerations would be performance overhead, and possibly some network config.

**Edit; minor correction, I'm fairly certain that you could build a docker that contains the driver for the device in question & have it working regardless of the host OS driver support; I'm assuming though that you're trying to get it working on existing Apps within TrueNas Scale & that making your docker images that can run this thing + have all the functionality of whatever you're trying to do would be a total pita.

 

[Johev]

in the shell; lspci to see if device is detected at all, lspci -k to see what (if any) drivers are present. Then checking if the drivers are 'working well' would then best be done by trying to do the needful; if it doesn't function the way you need it to, who cares if any other checks confirm drivers are 'working well'.

I'm 95% certain that if drivers aren't present on the OS hosting the docker then the device won't work on the docker. However, you could passthrough the device to a VM, install the drivers on the VM, then have your VM host the docker in question with now a working tuner. There your considerations would be performance overhead, and possibly some network config.

**Edit; minor correction, I'm fairly certain that you could build a docker that contains the driver for the device in question & have it working regardless of the host OS driver support; I'm assuming though that you're trying to get it working on existing Apps within TrueNas Scale & that making your docker images that can run this thing + have all the functionality of whatever you're trying to do would be a total pita.

Dear @Fleshmauler thank you very much for all your input. I have tried the shell command "lspci" and the "lspci -k" and I got back the following:

"root@tvheadend-b4f5f8894-vkppg:/# lspci
/bin/sh: lspci: not found"

This makes sense as I can't see any tuner in the TvHeadend interface.

How could I pass through the PCI-E card to a VM? All the tutorials that I read about talk about a GPU, which this is not.

Many thanks in advance for any advice.

 

[Fleshmauler]

Huh, uhh lspci should give a WHOLE list of things that truenas detects & then you'd have to do some detective work on identifying your card. Did you run this in the Truenas Scale Shell under System Settings > Shell? Because it should generally be a pretty long list.

On the long-ass list you'll find the PCIE Device # & you'd punch it in here when you're setting up/setup the VM under the 'Devices' section:

 

[Stux]

I'm assuming you're running tvheadend as some kind of app/container, and entered its shell.

You need to run lspci in the shell of the TrueNAS system.

You can do this from the System Settings shell menu, but it would be better if you used an SSH client to connect to TrueNAS, so that you could copy/paste the results.

 

[Johev]

Dear @Fleshmauler and @Stux, thank you so much for your input. I was able finally check the situation.

1. I did the lspci command under the truenas shell, instead of the docker. I was then able to find my pcie satellite TV card.
2. I have installed a Windows 10 pro VM and passed through the tuner. This way I was able to install both the drivers and update the card firmware to the latest version.
3. Then I removed the PCI-E card from the Windows 10 VM and added it to a Ubuntu server VM with a PCI-E passthrough.

Before point 3, I tried to install Tvheadend docker again, to see if the card would be detected with the new firmware, however unfortunately that was not the case. It's probably because of lack of drivers, however if the VM option works, as long as it's stable, I don't mind.

Thanks once again for all your support and helpful advice.