Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage) not detected for hardware transcoding - Unraid Docker

[Gkopemby 0]

Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage) - ffdetect crashes with exit code 135 (SIGSEGV) - Hardware transcoding not working on Unraid

Hardware:

• Dell R740xd
• Intel Xeon Gold 6138
• Matrox G200eW3 (onboard, card0) – native on motherboard
• Intel Arc B580 (PCIe, card1/renderD128)
• Unraid 7.3.1, kernel 6.18.33
• Resizable BAR enabled in BIOS

Problem: Emby 4.9.5.0 does not detect the Intel Arc B580 for hardware transcoding. Hardware Detection page shows no GPU adapters. Both VAAPI and QuickSync detection fail.

Key finding from hardware_detection log: ffdetect version 5.1-emby_2023_06_25_p4 crashes with exit code 135 (SIGSEGV) for both VAAPI and QuickSync detection
ExitCode: 135 (VAAPI)
ExitCode: 135 (QuickSync)

This is a segmentation fault – not just a "device not found" error, but a full crash of ffdetect when attempting to initialize VA-API with the B580.

Additionally, the /dev/dri devices inside the container show group owner dialout instead of video:
crwxrwxrwx 1 root dialout 226, 0 Jun 6 card0
crwxrwxrwx 1 root dialout 226, 1 Jun 6 card1
crwxrwxrwx 1 root dialout 226, 128 Jun 6 renderD128

What I have tried:

• Extra Parameters --device=/dev/dri:/dev/dri --group-add 18 – no GPU detected
• Installed intel-media-driver (iHD_drv_video.so) manually inside container – still crashes
• vainfo --display drm --device /dev/dri/renderD128 inside container returns vaInitialize failed with error code -1
• Tested with official emby/embyserver and emby/embyserver:beta images – same result, exit code 135
• Tested with Ubuntu 24.04 intel-media-va-driver 24.1.0 – iHD_drv_video.so init failed error code 18
• Tested with Ubuntu 25.04 intel-media-va-driver 25.1.2 – iHD hangs at Found init function __vaDriverInit_1_22, never returns
• Tested with Jellyfin-ffmpeg 7.1.3 – same iHD init hang for B580
• chmod 777 /dev/dri/* and setfacl -m u:99:rw /dev/dri/* – no improvement

What works on this system:

• FileFlows with Jellyfin-ffmpeg 7.1.4 successfully uses hevc_qsv with Intel Arc A310 (Alchemist)
• Plex successfully detects B580 but transcoding fails at stream start

Conclusion: The root cause appears to be that ffdetect 5.1-emby_2023_06_25_p4 crashes (SIGSEGV, exit 135) when trying to initialize VA-API for Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage/Xe2). This is likely because the iHD driver bundled with ffdetect does not support Battlemage architecture.

Question: Is there a planned update to ffdetect/ffmpeg with B580 support? The Emby forum thread #135987 mentions a fix was added in 4.9.2.1-beta but we cannot confirm this is present in the current release. Is there a workaround to manually replace the ffdetect binary or iHD driver?

EDIT
Root cause identified:

The SIGBUS crash is a confirmed bug in Intel's iHD driver for Battlemage/B580. A bug report exists directly at Intel's media-driver GitHub (issue #1927 and #1893):

"Running vainfo on Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage G21) with the iHD driver results in a SIGBUS crash during heap initialization in RenderHal_Initialize. The issue appears in memset() during state heap interface setup."

The fix requires intel-media-driver version 25.3.2 or later (commit e46f78c35dfd11d7d95addf7b0b68685a2010fae). None of the tested Emby containers include this version.

References:

• https://github.com/intel/media-driver/issues/1927
• https://github.com/intel/media-driver/issues/1893

Updated question: Does Emby plan to update the bundled iHD driver to version 25.3.2+ to fix the SIGBUS crash on Intel Arc B580 (Battlemage)? Is there a workaround to mount the host iHD driver into the Emby container in the meantime?

 

Edited 1 hour ago by Gkopemby