# Null video device?



## PacketMan (Feb 7, 2020)

Just curious, for those of us with headless machines, that have no video gpu device, not even in the cpu.  Is there a port/pkg that emulates a null video card? So after said port is installed, ports/pkgs that have dependencies on a gpu being present would be satisfied of that requirement? Or maybe a pkg is not required and there is a dev file that can do the trick? Just curious.


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## Phishfry (Feb 7, 2020)

What I have seen is that headless units, like PC-Engines APU1/2/3 that the CPU still has video cores.
So FreeBSD detects those cores even though there is no connectors for video output.
Probably a money issue as these use regular Jaguar AMD chips and to strip out the cores would cost more.

In another note there is an Xorg driver for headless use called x11-drivers/xf86-video-dummy.





						Xdummy – Xpra
					

xpra - screen for X




					xpra.org


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## Phishfry (Feb 7, 2020)

Here is a page for the APU2/3 cpu.


			https://www.amd.com/en/products/embedded-g-series-lx
		

Notice how it has integrated "AMD Radeon™ R1E GCU Graphics" even though PCEngines APU2/3 have no video connectors.

My best guess is that a custom AMD CPU with zero video cores would be more expensive because it would be a specialty item.
Cheaper for PCEngines to just buy an off the shelf CPU with video cores.

I have only had a couple of CPU's with no video cores at all. Intel E3-1220LV/1220LV2/1220LV3/1240LV5 chips are truly without video cores.


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## Phishfry (Feb 7, 2020)

Here are details of how bhyve handles it:


			[libvirt] [PATCH v3] bhyve: add vga configuration for video driver
		


SDL also has a dummy mode.
SDL_VIDEODRIVER=dummy


			http://sdl.beuc.net/sdl.wiki/SDL_envvars
		







						213300 – x11-servers/xorg-vfbserver: Xvfb is missing GLX extension
					






					bugs.freebsd.org
				











						Transcode for headless setup with GPU but no video port
					

I’m just about to upgrade my FreeNAS 11.2 server (FreeBSD 11.2) hardware which runs PMS and have an interesting question about HW transcode.  I wish to upgrade to a Supermicro X11SCH-F board which only has an IPMI video.  No “local” video port exists.  So the big question is:  If I buy a...




					forums.plex.tv


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## Geezer (Feb 8, 2020)

PacketMan said:


> Is there a port/pkg that emulates a null video card?



Tigervnc.


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## SirDice (Feb 10, 2020)

PacketMan said:


> ports/pkgs that have dependencies on a gpu being present would be satisfied of that requirement?


As far as I know there are no ports/packages that have that requirement. It's perfectly fine to install x11/nvidia-driver for example even if you don't have an NVidia card (or _any_ videocard). It's obviously not going to work but that doesn't change the fact you can still install it.


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