I’ve been trying to get hardware acceleration working on rootless containers of Plex and Jellyfin and I can’t get it to work the proper way.

My current workaround is having my device /dev/dri/renderD128 with permissions set to 666, but I feel like that really isn’t an ideal setup.

Some things I’ve done:

-Currently I’m running my containers with my user with ID 1000.

-My user is part of the render group, which is the group assigned to:

    /dev/dri/renderD128

-I’m passing the device to the containers as such:

  --device /dev/dri:/dev/dri

-In my plex container for example, I’m passing the IDs to use as such:

   -e PUID=1000 and -e PGID=1000

-I tried the option “–group-add keep-groups” and I see the groups in the container but I believe they’re assigned to the root user in the container, and from my understanding, the plex and jellyfin images I’ve tried I think they create a user inside with the IDs I pass, in this case 1000, and so this new user doesn’t get assigned my groups on the host. I’m using the LinuxServer.io images currently but I saw the official plex image creates a user named “plex”. The LinuxServer.Io images create a user named “abc”.

-Out of curiosity on the host I changed the group of /dev/dri/renderD128 to my user’s group 1000, but that didn’t work either

-I tried with the --privileged option too but that didn’t seem to work either, at least running podman as my user.

-I haven’t tried running podman as root for these containers, and I wonder how that compares security-wise vs having my /dev/dri/renderD128 with permissions set to 666

For some context, I’ve been transitioning from Docker to Podman rootless over the past 5 days maybe. I’ve learned a couple of things but this one has been quite a headache.

Any tips or hints would be appreciated. Thanks!