Set up NVIDIA NVENC on Fedora

This article guides users through installing Fedora and setting up the NVIDIA driver in order to use NVENC hardware acceleration on a Wowza Streaming Engine (WSE) server.

Notes:

• Accelerated encoding is not available in virtual hardware environments such as VMware or Xen.
  
  
• This article was tested against Fedora 18.
• Older graphics drivers for your NVIDIA hardware may limit NVENC-based video encoding to approximately 30 simultaneous encoding sessions. Update your graphics driver to the latest version to avoid this limitation.

Download and install Fedora

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Download and install Fedora on a server that includes a supported NVIDIA graphics card.

1. Go to the Fedora downloads page.
2. Install the operating system onto your server.
   • Select the Minimal Install environment
   • Select the following AddOns:
     • Development Tools
     • Standard

Prepare the system for driver installation

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After the installation is complete prepare the system for the NVIDIA driver installation by following the step below:

1. Log in to your server as a root user.
    
2. Update and upgrade all components.

   yum -y update
   yum -y upgrade

3. Install Development Tools (should already be installed)

   yum -y groupinstall "Development Tools"

4. Install kernel headers.

   yum -y install kernel-headers

5. Disable the Nouveau driver.
   

   mv /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r)-nouveau.img
   dracut --omit-drivers nouveau /boot/initramfs-$(uname -r).img $(uname -r)

Install the NVIDIA Linux driver

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The appropriate graphics driver depends on your server's graphics. Before completing the steps in this section, make sure you know which graphics driver to install on your server. (See the NVIDIA Driver Search page.

1. Log in to your server as a root user.
2. Download the graphics driver.
3. Make the driver installation package executable.

   chmod +x NVIDIA-Linux-*

4. Run the driver installation package.

   ./NVIDIA-Linux-*

5. During the installation, accept or acknowledge the following prompts:
   • Skip runlevel check
      
   • License Agreement
      
   • The modeprobe path is incorrect
      
   • Install NVIDIA 32-bit compatibility OpenGL libraries
      
   • Failed to execute chcon -t textrel_shlib_t (missing operand)
      
   • Continue anyway
      
   • Run nvidia-xconfig utility
      
   • Configuration successfully updated
6. Restart the server.

   shutdown -r 0

7. Install Java.
8. Install Wowza Streaming Engine.

You can now use the NVENC transcoder on your Fedora server. For more information, see Set up and run Transcoder in Wowza Streaming Engine.

More resources

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• NVIDIA Video Encode and Decode GPU Support Matrix
• Server specifications for NVIDIA acceleration with Wowza Streaming Engine transcoding