• [6.6.7] No login screen / Secure Boot Fails


    SonWon
    • Minor

    No plugins installed.

     

    While looking for an option to force menu resolution to 1920x1080 in syslinux configuration I discovered Uraid was booting legacy mode.  I had to turn off Secure Boot in the UEFI BIOS options to get Uraid to boot UEFI.  When I did this Uraid booted 1920x1080 however when you log into Unraid gui it reverts back to 1024x768.  Something isn't right with Unraid or the configuration.  I am using version 6.6.6.  Please help.

     

    The way I see it there are two bugs maybe one:

     

    1) Unraid gui defaulting to 1024x768.  This defeats my whole plan to use Unraid.

     

    2) Unraid will not boot UEFI with Secure Boot enabled.  Although this could possibly be something in the BIOS settings but it appears to be a bug?  This defeats the only reason I wanted to use UEFI and makes the system less secure.

     

    The resolution issue makes Unraid unusable for me.

     

    tower-diagnostics-20190225-1046.zip




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    22 minutes ago, SonWon said:

    Got it, the Unraid limitation is that I cannot use QXL for a VM.

    Not sure why you come to this conclusion, but Unraid does support QXL.

     

    image.png.55bd0aaa42ee158602801cc5f6b68c3f.png

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    NO NO NO. QXL is a virtual GPU type. QXL basically works for every VM in Unraid. If you have 2 graphics cards, you can have 2 VMs using it. If you can put 3 or 4 in your system you can have 3 or 4 VMs with it's own high performance GPUs. Let's say you buy 4 1080ti's you can have up to 4 VMs running at the same time each with it's own 1080ti. I guess you don't really know what "passthrough" means. It means you handing over the real hardware to the VM. QXL is a "virtual" emulated GPU. You can have as much VMs with "virtual" GPUs as you like. You can't connect a real monitor to a "virtual" GPU so you need a piece of software to give you the picture this GPU produces. VNC, RDP, Teamviewer whatever. QXL has nothing to do with the graphics card you plug in your system. It's emulated by software! For basic office stuff, web browsing and media consumption a virtual GPU is fine. If you wanna play games or render videos or have some sort of 3D CAD simulation program you need a dedicated graphics card. 

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    41 minutes ago, bastl said:

    NO NO NO. QXL is a virtual GPU type. QXL basically works for every VM in Unraid. If you have 2 graphics cards, you can have 2 VMs using it. If you can put 3 or 4 in your system you can have 3 or 4 VMs with it's own high performance GPUs. Let's say you buy 4 1080ti's you can have up to 4 VMs running at the same time each with it's own 1080ti. I guess you don't really know what "passthrough" means. It means you handing over the real hardware to the VM. QXL is a "virtual" emulated GPU. You can have as much VMs with "virtual" GPUs as you like. You can't connect a real monitor to a "virtual" GPU so you need a piece of software to give you the picture this GPU produces. VNC, RDP, Teamviewer whatever. QXL has nothing to do with the graphics card you plug in your system. It's emulated by software! For basic office stuff, web browsing and media consumption a virtual GPU is fine. If you wanna play games or render videos or have some sort of 3D CAD simulation program you need a dedicated graphics card. 

     

    Sorry but the terminology between Unraid VMs (VNC video driver) and KVM (Video) is different so my wording wasn't exactly correct.  Doesn't change my point.  The VNC video driver is set for QXL however the graphic card has to be set for VNC or pass through so for any VM that isn't using pass through it runs through VNC and takes a performance hit.  I don't need VNC when running KVM on top of a host OS so no performance hit.  I hope that is clear unless there is something I am not understanding?

     

    As I wrote I can only fit two graphic cards in this system so my system is limited to two pass through VMs using Unraid.  If Unraid was more flexible I wouldn't need VNC for any VMs.  KVM on a host OS gives me better performing VMs when not using pass through.  I tested this on a laptop running a quarter of the speed of the Unraid server I was building and KVM (running on an old clunky laptop) out performs the Unraid VNC (running on a 4 time faster system and this was with twice the CPU cores).  I wish I could test Unraid without pass through and VNC I suspect Unraid would have the advantage in that case.

     

    If you know of a way I can run VMs on Unraid without pass through or VNC then please do share.  And I'll test that setup too.  Wait I can't because the gui isn't working.

     

    I am willing to work with Lime to resolve the gui problem and even test running VMs without VNC or pass through if they are interested.

     

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    19 minutes ago, SonWon said:

    I don't need VNC when running KVM on top of a host OS so no performance hit.

    You are wrong. No matter what host OS you're using there is always a "virtual" GPU involved in KVM if you get a window that shows you the guest desktop. With other words, no GPU no display output ;) Always think of a real PC. What shows on your monitor if the PC has no GPU? NOTHING!!!

    I remember using virtmanager in Fedora to create my KVM VMs and there you had spice as option for a virtual GPU with similar performance to QXL. As I said before, there are tons of options to connect to your VM that has no real GPU. RDP for windows is kinda the best option, VNC or Anydesk, Teamviewer, NoMachine for Linux. And the difference between the spice client and vnc is marginal. 

     

    34 minutes ago, SonWon said:

    test running VMs without VNC or pass through if they are interested.

    I guess you still not really understand how virtualisation works.

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    Okay, I assume you are correct and the latency I am having from running a VM is because I have to go across the network.  So I suspect we would not be having this discussion if I could open a VM from Unraid gui.    Can we focus on why Unraid gui is not working?

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    While I was searching the Diagnostic text for clues why Unraid gui was failing it dawned on me that Unraid does not load a native driver for the GPU.  So I searched for a plugin that would load a driver.

     

    Good news and bad news:


    The good news, I got it working.  Unraid as I suspected was not initializing the GPU properly.  The workaround to fix this problem is to load the 'Unraid Nividia' plugin.  This plugin will load a GPU driver.  This will only work for systems booting on a Nividia GPU and only if it is supported by the driver.  After loading the plugin Unraid gui started working.

     

    The bad news, while the video stutter was better it was still present in a VM.  I tested this with Xubuntu 18.04.2 and compared it to a laptop running a VM running the same video.  The laptop is 5 years old and rather slow, Intel i7 4 core, 8 threads, 1.73 Ghz, 460m GPU.  The Unraid server is based on a AMD 2700X 4.3 Ghz, Geforce 1030 GPU.  The VM configurations between the two were identical accept for display.  The laptop VMM uses Spice while Unraid VM uses VNC.  On the laptop VM there was no detectable stutter in the test video.  So the stutter was either Unraid, GPU driver, or VNC.

     

    I had hoped Unraid was a good choice for me since I wanted the ease of configuration.  So this will likely be my last post since I will go down a different path.

     

    Thanks again for trying to help.

     

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    @SonWon As said thousand's of times before. DON'T USE UNRAIDS GUI for managing VMs. Use the web interface as it supposed to. The GUI mode is only for second choice "emergency use cases". Are you running your Windows machine in "Safe Mode" all the time? If so, you doin something wrong.

     

    Video is running fine for me either using a VNC client from within a VM connecting to another VM, or from another machine. Same for RDP, AnyDesk or Teamviewer. Again, the Unraid OS is meant to be running "headless" without any desktop environment. What do you think 99,99% of the internet server infrastructure runninng on? On desktop operation systems or headless??? Sorry for that posting, but I tried to explain this a couple of times. 99,99% of the people here in the forum running Unraid connecting via the webinterface from another machine to manage their servers or from within a VM as it's supposed to be. The 0.01% having a monitor connected maybe using it every 3-4 months for trouble shooting or testing stuff. 

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    11 hours ago, bastl said:

    @SonWon <snip>

     

    Video is running fine for me either using a VNC client from within a VM connecting to another VM, or from another machine.

    <snip>

    @bastl  Yes that didn't work for me either.  And the Unraid documentation says in the Unraid OS GUI Mode (Desktop) section, "... for users that don't have a separate device to use for connecting to the webGui."  That would be me when I finish this build.  Or perhaps the manual needs updating?  Besides, as I stated earlier your way for using Unraid doesn't work for me.

     

    However your post does raise an interesting question, why doesn't video playback work without stutter in my environment.  Let's try to find out, please answer the following questions:

     

    I am assuming you are running the VMs remotely so host GPU doesn't matter.

     

    Unraid Host:

    Unraid version?

    Any plugins that would improve performance?

    Host CPU?

    Host network connection type and speed?


    Guest OS (OS running in the VM)?

     

    Remote PC:

    OS and version?

    Browser?

    CPU?

    GPU?

    Memory?

     

    VM settings:

    CPU Mode?

    Logical CPU's assigned?

    Memory?

    Machine?

    BIOS?

    Graphics card?

    VNC Video Driver?

    Sound Card?

    Netword Bridge:

     

    Did I miss anything that could effect latency with playing a video in a remote VM?  A screenshot would likely be easiest.  I'll do my best to match your VM setup that plays video files with no problems.  I know one issue could be my network however that doesn't account for the stutter when running locally.

     

    After you post the settings we can discuss the differences.

     

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