Frigate appliance?

[thom-nic]

I'm learning to use Proxmox and following tutorials to setup a Frigate instance in Proxmox. Every tutorial I can find involves starting up a vanilla Debian container, installing the whole docker stack, then doing a nested container to run the frigate image from Docker hub. This is all new to me but it seems like it should be possible to run Frigate without the extra layer of container or VM. Yes?

[OnGle]

First I've heard of the software. But from a cursory glance it does seem possible, the real issue here is hardware dependencies and passthrough. A lot of stuff runs on docker because getting all the right versions of all the right software that also matches your hardware for AI stuff is still a bit of a pain, and just including everything means an extra few GB per supported option.

Also, from what I can tell proxmox LXC + docker instance & PCI passthrough is not gonna work, you'd need a full VM with KVM: https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/PCI_Passthrough

I'd be potentially open to having a go at making this appliance, but there's a few issues. Because of the different software requirements, to ensure it works on most proxmox instances, we'd really want to try and test it on nvidia, amd, intel and various ai accelerators. And I only have 1 spare GPU, which isn't in a proxmox machine at the moment.

CPU would be much easier, but of limited use, so even if we got an appliance out for the next release, it'd probably take another release after that before it was fully featured as we'd need community members to help test it.

[thom-nic]

Thanks for the response!

I'll admit ignorance, but from what I can tell, people have gotten hardware passthrough on LXC containers for use with Frigate.

Some related discussion/ tutorials:

• Frigate LXC container without Docker tteck/Proxmox#2711
• https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/ubuntu-lxc-ct-setup-with-device-passthrough-on-proxmox-ve-8-4-for-frigate-installation.167234/
• https://whatsnewandrew.com/installing-frigate-on-a-proxmox-lxc/

I agree that testing all of the different hardware options would seemt to be a challenge, but given the added convenience I would think people would be eager to test it.

[OnGle]

That info does seem quite promising. Although all of this would require additional host-side configuration that we couldn't automatically perform for using anything other than the CPU. Anything requiring more manual work from the user in a proxmox based install is something we're trying to avoid and this goes double for things we can't test during development.

Considering our current backlog as well as a lack of available hardware to develop, test and maintain with proper hardware support. As well as the additional required effort for any kind of automated testing, I'm not sure this is something we can reasonably provide at the moment.