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Enabling the iGPU on an OVH Server running Ubuntu

At least on Ubuntu 22.04 OVH install images you’ll find that the integrated GPU on your CPU is either not detected or your application will report you don’t have the hardware enabled even when you have a CPU with an integrated GPU such as the E-2288G, and it’s enabled in the BIOS.

I have personally tested these motherboards and know the workaround is needed on them, so assume this problem is common to at least all ASRock boards:

ASRock Rack
E3C246D4U2-2L2T
E3C246D4U2-2T

You should not need this fix on the S1200SP motherboards you usually get with the 1245vX servers, these seem to handle the iGPU properly and/or the OVH image did not have the issue in the first place.

Don’t know your current motherboard version? You can query your current motherboard model with the “lshw” command on and Linux system.

Edit the grub default config file (/etc/default/grub) and remove the “nomodeset” option

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="nomodeset iommu=pt"

Will become

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX="iommu=pt"

Rebuild the GRUB config file.

sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Reboot the machine and you should now be able to use the iGPU, you can verify it’s loaded by looking for results when you ls the /dev/dri device.

ls /dev/dri/
by-path card0 card1 renderD128

Extra Credit: if you’re using the iGPU for video transcoding be sure to enable the full feature set on your CPU by installing the “intel-media-va-driver-non-free” package on your Ubuntu/Debian system.

2 Comments

  1. Chris

    This post helped me out quite a bit, but I seem to be missing something. After rebooting /dev/dri appeared with card0 and by-path, but renderD128 appears to be missing. My OVH system has a E3C246D4U2-2T with a E-2386G. Where there any other steps you took to get this working?

    • Admin

      Perhaps you’ve fell victim to someone else messing with the BIOS on your server before you got it, you might need to go to the hidden BIOS menu by pressing shift (might be control, have no servers I can check on right now) and F1 when you see the ASRock logo screen, after the BIOS menu appears you’ll see something to the effect of “Advanced Intel Chipset”, in there the iGPU may have be turned off/set to the wrong port.

      Doing this probably voids your ability to get non existent support form OVH though, but if you did mysteriously break your server doing it they usually just replace the board 😛

      Sorry for the late reply.

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