Make.conf/VIDEO CARDS

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The VIDEO_CARDS make.conf setting is used to define what graphics support is enabled on your system. This graphics support can include a combination of kernel drivers and user-space libraries that as a whole provide graphics capability for your system. This Portage variable is generally used only by packages that directly implement graphics support, such as media-libs/mesa and a few others. Typically, VIDEO_CARDS settings are "stacked", which means that multiple related flags are specified, typically enabling various parts of the graphics stack that work together. Here are some useful examples:

/etc/make.conf (bash source code)

# This setting will support nearly all X/DRI-based Intel integrated graphics:
VIDEO_CARDS="intel dri3 i965 i915"

# This next setting is similar to the one above but will also enable Vulkan support for the DRI driver:
VIDEO_CARDS="intel vulkan-intel dri3 i965 i915"

# This next setting will enable Gallium for Intel integrated graphics -- The Intel drivers are currently more mature:
VIDEO_CARDS="intel gallium gallium-i915"

# This next setting could be useful if you have hybrid graphics on your laptop and you plan to use X:
VIDEO_CARDS="intel dri3 i965 i915 nvidia"

# This setting would be good for X-based graphics with Radeon cards using gallium:
VIDEO_CARDS="amdgpu vulkan-amdgpu radeon gallium gallium-r300 gallium-r600 gallium-radeonsi"

Funtoo Differences

Starting with Funtoo Linux 1.4, VIDEO_CARDS settings work a bit differently than in Gentoo and these differences are documented here. The design philosophy for the use of VIDEO_CARDS is to have each atom in the string map to a single specific graphics driver or capability. So, rather than have USE="gallium" VIDEO_CARDS="nouveau" to enable the nouveau driver with Gallium backend, Funtoo specifies just VIDEO_CARDS="gallium-nouveau". This turns out to be useful in practice since there are DRI and Gallium nouveau drivers that can now be set independently.

The Funtoo VIDEO_CARDS flags are designed to have a consistent format. If just a graphics driver is listed, such as i965, then it is an X-based DRI driver. Drivers that use the new Gallium driver architecture are in the format gallium-<driver> such as gallium-radeonsi. In addition, any optional framework is listed as a prefix, such as vulkan-i965 for optional DRI-based Vulkan support for i965+ Intel cards.

Also note that it is possible to have VIDEO_CARDS set for you via use of a Funtoo profile mix-in.

Changing VIDEO_CARDS Settings

When changing VIDEO_CARDS settings, either directly by modifying /etc/make.conf or by use of a mix-in, it is important to perform a deep update of your system and ensure that X is configured correctly for your new settings. At the minimum, this generally involves performing an emerge -auDN @world. You will likely notice a rebuild of media-libs/mesa and perhaps x11-libs/libdrm.

DRI3

The most well-supported version of DRI is version 2. There is a dri3 VIDEO_CARDS setting that can be enabled to enable support for version 3 of DRI, which should offer improved performance. DRI version 3 support may be less mature than the same driver with just version 2 support, so the availability of a VIDEO_CARDS option allows it to be turned off if you experience video issues. In general, however, dri3 has been around long enough to be generally robust for most users.

NVIDIA Drivers

The proprietary NVIDIA drivers are their own beast and have their own specific documentation on the wiki.

Video Acceleration Architectures

In addition to graphics driver architectures, over the years there have been different architectures designed to help accelerate the playback of video. As you might guess, these architectures are different levels of support depending upon the graphics driver selected. The VIDEO_CARDS settings related to graphics drivers are xa, vaapi, vdpau and xvmc. In Funtoo it is safe, and recommended, to append all these settings to your VIDEO_CARDS setting, which can be done by adding this to the end of your /etc/make.conf:

/etc/make.conf (bash source code)

VIDEO_CARDS="${VIDEO_CARDS} xa vaapi vdpau xvmc"

If you are using the workstation or desktop flavor, these settings will be enabled for you automatically. In addition, you may want to add some or all of these settings to your USE flags to enable any optional video acceleration support in regular software. These VIDEO_CARDS settings enable the support in the underlying graphics driver itself only, if available.

It's also important to note that while most of the time, video acceleration is provided by the underlying graphics driver, this is not the case for Intel integrated graphics, where it is necessary to emerge another ebuild to enable full video acceleration support:

root # emerge libva-intel-driver

Even more confusing, there is a new libva-intel-media-driver which is a new design of the VAAPI-based acceleration for Intel integrated graphics, and requires a bleeding-edge installation of media-libs/libva. This is something that is not yet actively supported under Funtoo but is something that I hope to play with soon.

Use within Ebuilds

Inside ebuilds, the VIDEO_CARDS settings is USE_EXPANDed to a USE flag with a prefix of video_card_. For example, radeonsi will set the video_card_radeonsi USE flag, gallium-osmesa will set the video_card_gallium-osmesa USE flag, etc. Pay careful attention to the use of underscores and hyphens. Hyphens are used in the video card variable name itself, whereas underscores are used in video_card_ only.

VIDEO_CARDS Settings

The most-common VIDEO_CARDS settings are listed below. For a comprehensive list of settings, type emerge -av mesa and peruse the list of USE flags.

name	description	platforms
name	description	platforms
`amdgpu`	AMDGPU is an Open Source graphics driver developed by AMD that supports the latest AMD Radeon graphics cards (GCN 1.2, HD 7xxxx+). It is typically used in conjunction with Mesa's `radeonsi` driver which provides OpenGL support. There is a kernel-space part and a user-space part (in	DRI • Gallium • X
`gallium-i915`	This is a gallium-based driver for Intel integrated graphics chipsets, i915 or later.	Gallium
`gallium-nouveau`	Open Source NVIDIA Gallium-based graphics driver.	Gallium
`gallium-osmesa`	"Osmesa" stands for "off-screen MESA" and allows rendering of graphics into a framebuffer in memory. This supports Gallium-based rendering.	Gallium
`gallium-r300`	A Gallium-based driver for older Radeon cards: R300, R350, RV350, RV380, RS400, RS480, R420, R423, RV410, RS600, RS690, RS740, RV515, R520, RV530, RV560, RV570, R580	Gallium
`gallium-r600`	A Gallium-based driver for Radeon graphics cards: R600, RV610, RV630, RV620, RV635, RV670, RS780, RS880, RV770, RV730, RV710, RV740, CEDAR, REDWOOD, JUNIPER, CYPRESS, PALM (Wrestler), SUMO, SUMO2, ARUBA, BARTS, TURKS, CAICOS, CAYMAN	Gallium
`gallium-radeonsi`	Open Source Radeon driver providing support for modern Radeon graphics (HD5430-HD5970, HDxxx, HD7xxx, R7 cards, R5 230, R9 280 and other R9 cards.) Gallium-based driver.	Gallium
`gallium-swrast`	Gallium-based software-only OpenGL driver, also known as "softpipe". This setting will also enable Intel's "swr" driver (taking advantage of some Intel processor instructions for acceleration) on supported CPU architectures.	Gallium • X
`gallium-tegra`	Open Source NVIDIA driver for Tegra (ARM CPU + Integrated NVIDIA graphics). Gallium-based driver.	Gallium
`gallium-virgl`	This driver provides accelerated OpenGL rendering within virtual machines via VirtualGL. Gallium-based driver.	Gallium
`i915`	Enables support for Intel integrated graphics, i915 and more recent chipset. Most modern laptops with Intel integrated graphics will want this enabled.	DRI • X
`i965`	Enables support for Intel integrated graphics, i965 and more recent chipset. Most modern laptops with Intel integrated graphics will want this enabled.	DRI • X
`intel`	Enables general support for Intel integrated graphics. This setting is required when using any Intel-related settings	DRI • X
`nouveau`	Open Source NVIDIA DRI-based X graphics driver.	DRI • X
`nvidia`	NVIDIA proprietary accelerated driver support. This driver includes support for traditional X-based accelerated rendering and Vulkan. Although this driver supports X, it does not use the kernel's DRI.	Vulkan • X
`osmesa`	"Osmesa" stands for "off-screen MESA" and allows rendering of graphics into a framebuffer in memory. This supports X/DRI-based rendering.	DRI • X
`r100`	An X/DRI-based driver for older Radeon cards: R100, RV100, RV200, RS100, RS200	DRI • X
`r200`	An X/DRI-based driver for older Radeon cards: R200, RV250, RV280, RS300	DRI • X
`radeon`	General support for Radeon cards. This setting is required when using any Radeon-related setting.	DRI • X
`swrast`	DRI-based driver that does OpenGL without any hardware support. Enabled by default regardless of profile settings, since Mesa needs at least one "real" output to generate libGL.	DRI • X
`virgl`	This driver provides accelerated OpenGL rendering within virtual machines via VirtualGL. X/DRI-based driver.	DRI • X
`vulkan-amdgpu`	Enable Vulkan support for AMDGPU.	Vulkan
`vulkan-intel`	Enables Mesa's DRI-based Vulkan driver for Intel chipsets.	DRI • Vulkan