How to enable integrated GPU (with QSV) on Coffee Lake CPU in Ubuntu 18.x

Question

I am so far unable to get Plex/ffmpeg to recognize the integrated GPU in my Core i7-8700 CPU. From my research it appears this is a common issue related to Coffee Lake CPUs, not just this specific model.

I started on vanilla Ubuntu 18.04, but also tried installing a mainline 4.17 kernel on 18.04, as well as upgrading to Ubuntu 18.10 with default kernel as well as latest mainline 4.18 kernel. None of these have resolved the issue.

Additional troubleshooting attempted:

• usermod -aG video USERNAME

• Editing /etc/default/grub with the following options:

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash quiet i915.alpha_support=1"
  

• Later changed to:

  GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="splash quiet intel_pstate=skylake_hwp i915.enable_guc=-1 i915.alpha_support=1"
  

  (using sudo update-grub after each change)

• Confirmed integrated GPU is enabled in BIOS

• Installed latest graphics drivers from http://ppa.launchpad.net/oibaf/graphics-drivers/

• Followed the entire process to build QuickSync-enabled binaries from here

Nothing seems to be working. From what I've read, my current kernel version includes support for Coffee Lake graphics, but they simply are not recognized. Here are some additional details to aid in troubleshooting:

• The error Plex logs when trying to use hardware transcoding:

  ERROR - [FFMPEG] - No VA display found for device: /dev/dri/renderD128.
  

• CPU: i7-8700

• Motherboard: MSI Z370 Gaming Plus (MS-7B61)

• Ubuntu version: 18.10 Cosmic Cuttlefish (development branch)

• Current kernel: 4.18.0-7-generic

• vainfo

  error: failed to initialize display
  

• sudo lshw -C video

  *-display UNCLAIMED
     description: VGA compatible controller
     product: Intel Corporation
     vendor: Intel Corporation
     physical id: 2
     bus info: pci@0000:00:02.0
     version: 00
     width: 64 bits
     clock: 33MHz
     capabilities: pciexpress msi pm vga_controller bus_master cap_list
     configuration: latency=0
     resources: memory:de000000-deffffff memory:c0000000-cfffffff ioport:f000(size=64) memory:c0000-dffff
  

• lsmod | grep i915

  (nothing)

• lspci | grep VGA

  00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation Device 3e92
  

• ls /dev/dri

  ls: cannot access '/dev/dri': No such file or directory
  

I would really appreciate any help getting this working. Let me know if there's any further information you'd like me to collect.

Answer 1

For anyone who stumbles across this thread in a search: after using ukuu to update to mainline kernel 4.18.11-041811-generic, hardware video transcoding with Quick Sync now works. If you update your kernel to 4.18.11-041811-generic and that alone doesn't solve the issue, perhaps the updated video drivers from the oibaf PPA are needed too; I already had those installed prior to updating my kernel.