The Problem with the Latest Linux Kernel on NVIDIA GPUs

When it comes to installing a major PCIe card and using the latest version of kernel 5.4 manual install from kernel.org, there's often a problem. The Sapphire 5600 XT from AMD is one such card that requires a relatively new Linux kernel to take full advantage of its encoder. However, as we've discovered, this newer kernel doesn't work well with certain GPUs, including the NVIDIA GeForce.

In our case, we wanted to use the Sapphire 5600 XT on Linux because it's encoder is pretty magical and has been useful in another project where we're trying to get h.265 Hardware encoder working. However, when we tried to install the latest version of kernel 5.4, it didn't work as expected. Instead, an older kernel like 4.19 worked fine.

We've encountered this problem before with other NVIDIA cards as well, and major well doesn't seem to be stable for long-term use. On the other hand, cards from Blackmagic Design, such as the Blackmagic Intensity Pro 4K, have similar driver quirks in terms of compilation but are more stable over time. We've used these cards before and have found them to be great options for capturing high-quality video.

Another option we're considering is the Elgato Epifanio II I/O card, which offers 4K 30p capture capabilities and has a compact design that makes it easy to set up. However, its tiny fan can age over time when used constantly for video capture and recording, which may be a concern if you plan to use it frequently.

Our current setup is based on the Rolly cart and the slider Micro PC, which we've upgraded with the Blackmagic Pro 4K card. To get this working, we had to roll back our version of Ubuntu from 20.04 to 19.04, which is well-supported by the newer Linux kernel. This was a necessary compromise to ensure stability and performance.

We're also considering using the AMD Ryzen Threadripper processor in our system, but for now, we're sticking with the Sapphire 5600 XT. Our current system has 14 cores, which should be sufficient for most video production tasks. However, if we want to use the newer kernel that requires more powerful hardware, we may need to consider using a different processor or experimenting with other options in another system.

The Benefits of Having Multiple Capture Cards

Having multiple capture cards can offer several benefits, especially when it comes to live streaming and multi-camera editing. With multiple cameras, you can record one thing at once and have everything automatically synchronized, making the editing process much easier. This is exactly what we're planning to do with our current system.

We want to set up a hardware camera overhead and use three 4K 60p capture cards from Magewell, which would give us a much better live streaming setup and capture capabilities than using just one card. Our current plan is to bifurcate one of the x8 slots and install a modified add-in card or dual-port Magewell cards to achieve this.

Conclusion

In conclusion, while having multiple capture cards can be beneficial for video production tasks, it's essential to consider the compatibility and stability issues that may arise when using newer Linux kernels. We've learned from our experiences with the Sapphire 5600 XT and other NVIDIA GPUs that older kernels may work better in certain situations.

We'll continue to experiment with different options and share our findings with you, our audience. If you have any experience with video production or know of any other capture card solutions that might be helpful, we'd love to hear from you. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you in the next video!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso it's going on the studio the quarantine and all well no one no one's here we're all working from home just doing a little bit of cleaning and degreasing but do you have to decrease the set often it's like well you know sometimes those laptop reviews they get a little messy and then you've got to yes yes degreasing is involved a fair bit one of the main things that makes my life easier like I don't production value like I don't want to put time into a camera crew and planning and not rambling and it's you know a certain weakness a certain lack of accessibility to the the average Joe person is going to come with that but one of the pieces of equipment that we do have that are really like this repurposed medical Rolly cart we call it Rosie it's got a sound board on it which is great it's like use third hand it's a pretty good mixing board it's a pretty good upgrade over our older mixing board and there's a pullout keyboard tray and a 32 inch monitor from Korea that's not you know it's a little flaky it's got some problems but it's 4k which is great DisplayPort 1.2 and then it's got a computer strapped to the back of it and this is what we use for our live streams and our live capture because you just roll this cart wherever you need it it's got a mage well capture card that is the single most expensive piece of equipment in the entire thing it's made well pro capture 4k 60 Hertz it's $1,000 capture card at mage well they never go on sale they do not budge on the price they don't send out reviews I mean sometimes it'll send out like a review loners but like I tried to borrow a card from mage well and they were just like no sorry it was like well I don't I don't blame you I guess but they're really good and they're not cutting edge so I really would love to have like the dual port or the quad port but the dual port is like $2,000 it's like seventeen eighteen hundred dollars and level one's doing pretty good but no no no get some black magic 4k intensity pros those are pretty cheap you can get those on the second-hand market for around a hundred dollars they'll do 4k 30 that's good enough it's good enough but the problem is that our capture machine which has been our capture machine forever is the AE 700k and it's basically a launch day 87 okay and it's high clock speed six cores is great it's from a time when OBS was architected to run a relatively small number of threads and the really high clock speed at the age of seven card cadence between stable of 5 gigahertz has worked well it's not really great anymore though we need something with a little bit more horsepower enter the asrock creator x2 99 yeas right creator x2 99 it's pretty good x2 99 motherboard what it's actually a great x2 night on motherboard it's pretty good in this use case because we've got 4 expansion slots one of which is used for the GPU we got 3 m dot 2 so we can use end up to storage I've actually got an MDOT to to you know to adapter and we've got our Slugger or slide your teeny-tiny look at this I reviewed this case this is a tiny full size full ATX case get our micro power supply in there we've got a 1 terabyte liquid in via me in there this is great for video capture and longevity and it's so much smaller than the brobdingnagian full sized ATX case strapped to the back of this medical cart this medical cart as great as it is but it's got room for that it's awesome I've much rather have a smaller more powerful computer at the back it's also got a PCI Express Bob one slot which is great for an old 1080p a premedia capture card that we have so this thing can load up all of the capture I'm probably going to try to modify this at some point to bifurcate one of the by 8 slots into 2 by 4 slots so I could run even more capture cards there are other X to 1900 boards like the Asus WS Sage X 299 but it lacks onboard 10 gig whereas the Creator the Azeroth creator X 299 has onboard 10 gig plus an onboard Intel Nick plus the a Zaraki BIOS and the whole the overall platform works exceptionally well with Linux is what we use for all our capture because it just works we never have to worry about it and Linux plus made well capture is the most stable thing on planet Earth asterisk will come back to so this build is what we use for everything and it hasn't led us down in a very very long time knock on wood we've got our HDMI capture that we use with our lumix s1 and we've got the audio going from the sound board into the camera and then we just capture everything in you know directly from the camera that way we don't have any synchronization issues or having it's like oh we're running it we're gonna do a four hour stream talking about how great big used to be and how reddit is crap and you'll like it too or that time that something went wrong with something or another level-one diagnostic or a linux live stream soon soon and it's rock solid stable can't get out of the windows windows it's just like you know what I'm gonna install an update in the background and just quietly break everything oh you've been running an IPSec connection for four days continuously I'm just gonna mysteriously not work anymore because reasons oh I've been you know booted too long when you hit control the lead or you have to run something as administrator I'm gonna make the screen completely black for thirty seconds before I ever pop up for anything in the middle because there's some kind of weird memory fragmentation going on and I'm Windows and I can't figure that out yeah we don't have to be able to any of that on Linux I mean Linux is really if you want rock-solid stability it's amazing so here's that hacks tricked with mage well Ubuntu 20 point oh four doesn't work doesn't work with the mage well capture card last time the mage well capture drivers was updated it's 2019 it's like May of 2019 that driver you have to download and compile to run with your kernel cool cool I can do that that's not a problem that's not it's annoying for noobs to have to deal with I can deal with that the problem is that however this mate well driver is written must not be that great because generally every time there's a major kernel update I have to do something completely different to get it to work and right now it's broken on kernel 5.4 it's an early version of 5.4 in such a way that the module loads but the load average of the system just slowly climbs nope no kernel loops azar generated there's no kernel panic just eventually the system has a load average of like 500 it's completely unresponsive and it only does that when a major PCIe card is installed the very latest version of kernel 5.4 manual install from kernel.org does not work an older kernel like 4.19 totally works fine so in our build here I wanted to use the as the Sapphire 5600 XT from AMD on Linux because it is like its encoder is pretty magical and I've got another project where I'm trying to get that h.265 Hardware encoder working let's not talk about that yet on Linux the problem is you need a relatively new Linux kernel to take full advantage of that relatively new GPU guess what major well doesn't work well with but that's had the major well card there isn't a more stable card like having used the Blackmagic intensity Pro 4k on Linux you know it's got a lot of the same driver quirks in terms of like the compile aspect but it's just not stable over the long term we have two of these cars they're great cards they're great cards for the money they're relatively inexpensive especially compared to that thousand dollar mage well but yeah we've also got the epifanov II i/o which is another great USB capture solution you know it's it's 4k 30 like the like the the black magic stuff it's not bad it's pretty good but it has a little tiny fan on the inside and the little tiny fan on the inside will age when you use it constantly for YouTube for video capture and I want basically an appliance like a medical card that you just roll in and it's like click ok we're good to go no more thought the cameraman is a robot it's a literal robot yeah it's probably gonna get another mage well capture card because thank you thank you for everybody that's supporting us so we can get another mage well capture card it's really awesome for k60 and then sort of down sampling that for youtube or sort of reed juggling that for youtube it's pretty awesome you don't need 4k 60 but it's nice it's nice to experiment with the video files and kind of thing so now our new Rolly cart upgraded the slider Micro PC we got the Blackmagic Pro 4k the epifanio G well capture I had to roll back the version of Ubuntu that we were using from 20 point oh four to nineteen point oh four which is well supported as of you know April 15 to 20 20 hey you remember how I was complaining about Ubuntu 2400 for the newer version of the Linux kernel guess what means we'll just fixed good job made well a Mundell this is level 1 this is just you know a quickie look at our Rolly cart and the slider case the tiny Sawyer case which you know is fabulously expensive for what it is but it's so tiny and the system is relatively quiet given the bits 14 cores and given that it's X 299 I did consider thread Ripper I'll mention that really quickly I did consider thread Ripper but I didn't think I could cram thread Ripper into such a small package the 3950 X was a very strong contender because the 3950 x on linux with a lot of threads actually does work really well but for now we're using the software encoder and 14 cores is basically fine because the 5550 600 i'm not going to be able to use with that older version of the kernel for the thing that I want I'm gonna have to do that experiment in another system because I need a newer kernel to do the the unholy thing that I have planned alright so many dependencies I went to nineteen point oh four works fine with 256 hundred x t for normal purposes it's just my purposes are no norm not not normal at all and then the mage well thing is like 14 cores when the ads are Creator X 299 three full size expansion sauce one by one expansion slot with my intention to bifurcate one of the x8 slots a little bit of the modified add-in card maybe pick up the mage well dual port cards then I would have three four K 60s we would have a much better live streaming setup have a much better capture setup because for builds and things like that because then I can have a hardware camera overhead and just record one thing at once and everything is automatically synchronized that actually makes multi camera editing way way easier so some experiments maybe you guys have more experience with video production than idea to have some ideas or you want to contribute engagement challenge but that's what I'm tinkering with in the studio while waiting for this thing to pass I'm Wonder this is level one there wasn't really any point to this video other than just me talking to the camera signing out and I'll see you later and thanks for watching it's cool it's fun we're surviving see ya youso it's going on the studio the quarantine and all well no one no one's here we're all working from home just doing a little bit of cleaning and degreasing but do you have to decrease the set often it's like well you know sometimes those laptop reviews they get a little messy and then you've got to yes yes degreasing is involved a fair bit one of the main things that makes my life easier like I don't production value like I don't want to put time into a camera crew and planning and not rambling and it's you know a certain weakness a certain lack of accessibility to the the average Joe person is going to come with that but one of the pieces of equipment that we do have that are really like this repurposed medical Rolly cart we call it Rosie it's got a sound board on it which is great it's like use third hand it's a pretty good mixing board it's a pretty good upgrade over our older mixing board and there's a pullout keyboard tray and a 32 inch monitor from Korea that's not you know it's a little flaky it's got some problems but it's 4k which is great DisplayPort 1.2 and then it's got a computer strapped to the back of it and this is what we use for our live streams and our live capture because you just roll this cart wherever you need it it's got a mage well capture card that is the single most expensive piece of equipment in the entire thing it's made well pro capture 4k 60 Hertz it's $1,000 capture card at mage well they never go on sale they do not budge on the price they don't send out reviews I mean sometimes it'll send out like a review loners but like I tried to borrow a card from mage well and they were just like no sorry it was like well I don't I don't blame you I guess but they're really good and they're not cutting edge so I really would love to have like the dual port or the quad port but the dual port is like $2,000 it's like seventeen eighteen hundred dollars and level one's doing pretty good but no no no get some black magic 4k intensity pros those are pretty cheap you can get those on the second-hand market for around a hundred dollars they'll do 4k 30 that's good enough it's good enough but the problem is that our capture machine which has been our capture machine forever is the AE 700k and it's basically a launch day 87 okay and it's high clock speed six cores is great it's from a time when OBS was architected to run a relatively small number of threads and the really high clock speed at the age of seven card cadence between stable of 5 gigahertz has worked well it's not really great anymore though we need something with a little bit more horsepower enter the asrock creator x2 99 yeas right creator x2 99 it's pretty good x2 99 motherboard what it's actually a great x2 night on motherboard it's pretty good in this use case because we've got 4 expansion slots one of which is used for the GPU we got 3 m dot 2 so we can use end up to storage I've actually got an MDOT to to you know to adapter and we've got our Slugger or slide your teeny-tiny look at this I reviewed this case this is a tiny full size full ATX case get our micro power supply in there we've got a 1 terabyte liquid in via me in there this is great for video capture and longevity and it's so much smaller than the brobdingnagian full sized ATX case strapped to the back of this medical cart this medical cart as great as it is but it's got room for that it's awesome I've much rather have a smaller more powerful computer at the back it's also got a PCI Express Bob one slot which is great for an old 1080p a premedia capture card that we have so this thing can load up all of the capture I'm probably going to try to modify this at some point to bifurcate one of the by 8 slots into 2 by 4 slots so I could run even more capture cards there are other X to 1900 boards like the Asus WS Sage X 299 but it lacks onboard 10 gig whereas the Creator the Azeroth creator X 299 has onboard 10 gig plus an onboard Intel Nick plus the a Zaraki BIOS and the whole the overall platform works exceptionally well with Linux is what we use for all our capture because it just works we never have to worry about it and Linux plus made well capture is the most stable thing on planet Earth asterisk will come back to so this build is what we use for everything and it hasn't led us down in a very very long time knock on wood we've got our HDMI capture that we use with our lumix s1 and we've got the audio going from the sound board into the camera and then we just capture everything in you know directly from the camera that way we don't have any synchronization issues or having it's like oh we're running it we're gonna do a four hour stream talking about how great big used to be and how reddit is crap and you'll like it too or that time that something went wrong with something or another level-one diagnostic or a linux live stream soon soon and it's rock solid stable can't get out of the windows windows it's just like you know what I'm gonna install an update in the background and just quietly break everything oh you've been running an IPSec connection for four days continuously I'm just gonna mysteriously not work anymore because reasons oh I've been you know booted too long when you hit control the lead or you have to run something as administrator I'm gonna make the screen completely black for thirty seconds before I ever pop up for anything in the middle because there's some kind of weird memory fragmentation going on and I'm Windows and I can't figure that out yeah we don't have to be able to any of that on Linux I mean Linux is really if you want rock-solid stability it's amazing so here's that hacks tricked with mage well Ubuntu 20 point oh four doesn't work doesn't work with the mage well capture card last time the mage well capture drivers was updated it's 2019 it's like May of 2019 that driver you have to download and compile to run with your kernel cool cool I can do that that's not a problem that's not it's annoying for noobs to have to deal with I can deal with that the problem is that however this mate well driver is written must not be that great because generally every time there's a major kernel update I have to do something completely different to get it to work and right now it's broken on kernel 5.4 it's an early version of 5.4 in such a way that the module loads but the load average of the system just slowly climbs nope no kernel loops azar generated there's no kernel panic just eventually the system has a load average of like 500 it's completely unresponsive and it only does that when a major PCIe card is installed the very latest version of kernel 5.4 manual install from kernel.org does not work an older kernel like 4.19 totally works fine so in our build here I wanted to use the as the Sapphire 5600 XT from AMD on Linux because it is like its encoder is pretty magical and I've got another project where I'm trying to get that h.265 Hardware encoder working let's not talk about that yet on Linux the problem is you need a relatively new Linux kernel to take full advantage of that relatively new GPU guess what major well doesn't work well with but that's had the major well card there isn't a more stable card like having used the Blackmagic intensity Pro 4k on Linux you know it's got a lot of the same driver quirks in terms of like the compile aspect but it's just not stable over the long term we have two of these cars they're great cards they're great cards for the money they're relatively inexpensive especially compared to that thousand dollar mage well but yeah we've also got the epifanov II i/o which is another great USB capture solution you know it's it's 4k 30 like the like the the black magic stuff it's not bad it's pretty good but it has a little tiny fan on the inside and the little tiny fan on the inside will age when you use it constantly for YouTube for video capture and I want basically an appliance like a medical card that you just roll in and it's like click ok we're good to go no more thought the cameraman is a robot it's a literal robot yeah it's probably gonna get another mage well capture card because thank you thank you for everybody that's supporting us so we can get another mage well capture card it's really awesome for k60 and then sort of down sampling that for youtube or sort of reed juggling that for youtube it's pretty awesome you don't need 4k 60 but it's nice it's nice to experiment with the video files and kind of thing so now our new Rolly cart upgraded the slider Micro PC we got the Blackmagic Pro 4k the epifanio G well capture I had to roll back the version of Ubuntu that we were using from 20 point oh four to nineteen point oh four which is well supported as of you know April 15 to 20 20 hey you remember how I was complaining about Ubuntu 2400 for the newer version of the Linux kernel guess what means we'll just fixed good job made well a Mundell this is level 1 this is just you know a quickie look at our Rolly cart and the slider case the tiny Sawyer case which you know is fabulously expensive for what it is but it's so tiny and the system is relatively quiet given the bits 14 cores and given that it's X 299 I did consider thread Ripper I'll mention that really quickly I did consider thread Ripper but I didn't think I could cram thread Ripper into such a small package the 3950 X was a very strong contender because the 3950 x on linux with a lot of threads actually does work really well but for now we're using the software encoder and 14 cores is basically fine because the 5550 600 i'm not going to be able to use with that older version of the kernel for the thing that I want I'm gonna have to do that experiment in another system because I need a newer kernel to do the the unholy thing that I have planned alright so many dependencies I went to nineteen point oh four works fine with 256 hundred x t for normal purposes it's just my purposes are no norm not not normal at all and then the mage well thing is like 14 cores when the ads are Creator X 299 three full size expansion sauce one by one expansion slot with my intention to bifurcate one of the x8 slots a little bit of the modified add-in card maybe pick up the mage well dual port cards then I would have three four K 60s we would have a much better live streaming setup have a much better capture setup because for builds and things like that because then I can have a hardware camera overhead and just record one thing at once and everything is automatically synchronized that actually makes multi camera editing way way easier so some experiments maybe you guys have more experience with video production than idea to have some ideas or you want to contribute engagement challenge but that's what I'm tinkering with in the studio while waiting for this thing to pass I'm Wonder this is level one there wasn't really any point to this video other than just me talking to the camera signing out and I'll see you later and thanks for watching it's cool it's fun we're surviving see ya you\n"