Jetjockey

Well..... I've tried evrything I can think of. I've watched the informative video on the subject and have tried binding the Vfio driver, this allows the Win10 VM to start without objection, BUT... I get no video out put from the Nvidea 6800 in PCI-e slot one, and all of my drives are unavailable to Unraid as they are in the same IOMMU group as the Nvide 6800 in slot 1. Ive then tried all of the ACS override settings (only Down stream and Multi function seem to split the groups) and still get no output from the Nvidea 6800 but the drives at least become available. I've repeated this several times, and have even substituted an Nvidea 7300 in place of the 6800 but with exactly the same results. I would welcome any suggestions as to why the Win10 VM will run when i split the groups but will not supply a video signal. If I alter the Win10 VM template to use a GT730 in the smaller PCIe slot 2 then the Win10 VM runs with no problem and outputs a glorious Windows 10 desktop. There's obviously more to this than just IOMMU grouping. I'm wondering if this is a limitation of the Supoermicro X10SL7-F motherboard? Many thanks in advance. 🙂

Hello. Yes and no! I am, but I'm now having to do it from a remote device. Unraid has decided to throw a funny turn and is refusing to boot to the Gui on the monitor attached to it. This has happened since introducing the nvidea 6800, and is even the same with the 6800 removed. Dohh! I now get the message Nvidea-smi Command Not Found before the screen goes blank and the GUI fails to appear. Also, one CPU core remains pegged at 100%. If I choose Unraid with no GUI at the boot menu then that works fine. However, that's another problem for another day. I've managed to find an informative video all about VM's and IOMMU groups and it appears that I need to use either the append command to bind the vfio-pci drivers to the Nvidea 6800 or the ACS override patch to split the IOMMU groups. Am I on the right track? Thanks. 🙂

Hello. 🤗 I have just removed a GT 730 from the small PCI slot on my X10SL7-F motherboard, and replaced it with a GTX 6800 fitted to the full length PCI slot. I then edited the VM template accordingly. My WIN 10 virtual machine will not now run, objecting that the new iommu group is not viable for the graphics card. It also wants me to ensure thAt the device is tied to its vfio driver. How can I correct this. Any help greatly appreciated. Thank you. 😊

Hello. 😊 I'm sorry if this has been covered before, but I'm hoping to introduce GPU hardware acceleration for Plex on my Supermicro X10SL7-F. I already have a GTX730 in the smaller PCI express slot on the motherboard which is used for a WIN 10 virtual machine. This only leaves the full sized PCI slot next to it. Just to experiment I popped an old Nvidea 6800 card into the larger slot but this slot seems to be shared by the onboard A speed GPU, I had to enter the BIOS and tell the onboard GPU to give preference to the added Nvidea 6800. BTW, and taking into account there is a pecking order between which function gets hold of the GPU first (Virtual machine or Plex hardware acceleration), Does anybody already have this motherboard and have a working solution? I dont mind buying a new graphics card but anything with any power appears to need a full size PCI slot. Can I use the full size slot without running into conflicts with the onboard A speed GPU, and would such a card co exist alongside the GTX730? In reality I cannot imagine running hardware acceleration for Plex, and running any virtual machines at the same time, but it would be a bonus if I could. Any help would be greatly appreciated. 🙂 P.S> I did have my eye on a pallit 1050ti Kalm X but this also appears to need a full size slot, as does the PNY Quadro P2000! 🤔

A very quick query. Can anybody offer me some advice/statistics on the real world benefit of using a SAS drive over a SATA drive. Has anybody here personal experience? I know there's often a huge difference in price but I've found a deal that puts the price in the same ball park as SATA. I'm just wondering if the benefits outweigh the potential problems? By problems I mean that should the motherboard die a horrible death I would need to buy an LSI SAS controller with my next motherboard. Am I painting myself into a corner here for minimal benefit? Thank you in advance. 🙂

Thanks Johnnie.

Hello everybody. A quick query if I may. I've noticed that when I'm attempting to manipulate the Unraid GUI on my Supermicro X10SL7-F, the screen update is painfully slow. I'm talking about using a monitor plugged directly into the onboard VGA output which I think is "Aspeed", when accessing the GUI remotely on another device there is no such problem. I seem to remember this occurring some time ago, maybe a year ago, after an Unraid update. I'm now running the latest 6.83. Does anybody know of this problem or have a solution please? Update! I'm now almost certain this is a driver issue. Ive added an old graphics card I had laying about (Gforce 6300 LE from memory) and the Unraid GUI now flys along. Obviously I would prefer not to have to add a separate graphics card so if anybody has the answer to installing the Aspeed driver then that woulkd be very helpful. Many Thanks.🙂

Many Thanks for your info doron, that's very encouraging. Ill take the plunge and try one of those HGST 8Tb Helium filled drives I think, the non 4096n variants are now end of line and can be picked up for sub £200 which seems good value. All my data drives are Vanilla Toshiba 5400rpm 3Tb drives, not the fastest, but they have been bullet proof thus far (5 Yrs). Some 10 years ago I bought 5 Seagate Enterprise 500Gb drives, they cost me a fortune. Every last one of them went bad within the year with smart errors such as block reallocation despite very light use. Never again seagate.

Thanks for that Johnnie, I’m thinking the SAS drive might be a bit faster, thus removing another bottleneck

Well, I’ve been running Unraid for at least 5yrs with few problems (most self inflicted). I use a Supermicro board after flashing the Onboard SAS controller to IT mode and it’s been a rock solid platform. However, I’m about to remove a SATA parity drive and add a new SAS drive to the Onboard SAS controller And wonder if this might cause problems? Up to now I’ve been running all SATA drives on the onboard SAS controller. Has anybody here had any experience with this, and would they be prepared to share it? Thanks in advance. 👍

Thanks everybody for your help, the SAS controller is updated, and I’ve moved the 2 SSD cache drives over to the SATA controller with no issues. Hopefully the new parity Drive will be accepted when I plug it in. I’m about to order an 8TB SAS drive to replace the 3TB SATA drive. Has anybody here experienced mixing SAS and SATA drives on the SAS controller on this Supermicro X10SL7-F? Thanks!

Quick update. After creating a bootable USB stick (Freedos) and attempting to run the flash utility i get the message "Failed to initialize PAL". At that point the flash utility quits before doing anything else. 🤔 Can anybody help? I have read the instructions for the UEFI install method but this is not making much sense as the actions mirror those of the DOS method. The only difference is the install file which is called SMC2308T.nsh instead of SMC2308T.bat. How does one run an .NSH file? Thank you. 🙂

Thank you sincerely for that. 😊 I had already gone to the Broadcom site but was not sure if the stand alone card that they mention also covers the onboard supermicro chip. I didn't want to take the chance with Gigabytes worth of files on my server. However, I failed to find the Supermicro ftp source when i looked as all the links I found no longer are active. May I ask Doron, how did you find that ftp link, i failed miserably both googling and navigating the Supermicro site. All i could find were Bios and BMC updates. Ahhhh. I see, it was under Drivers! Of course, why bother putting it under Firmware? How stupid am I? 🙄

Hello. I'm sorry to trouble everybody, but I've spent hours and hours trying to find the files for flashing the firmware on my onboard LSI controller. I can remember doing this back in 2015 when I first got the Motherboard (X10SL7-F) so that it would be compatible with Unraid. I flashed the default IR firmware over to the IT version back then (version 7). I now want to update the firmware to the latest version (version 20?) as I am about to upgrade my Parity drive to an 8GB SAS drive instead of the current 3GB SATA drive. BTW i believe the onboard controller is an LSI 2308? I have hunted high and low for the firmware and the update utility and cannot find them anywhere. All roads lead me to non existant webpages and error 404. Even the Supermicro ftp pages fail to respond and time out!!! Grrr!! Could anybody please let me know where I could find the relevant firmware, either version 19 or 20 and I would be eternally grateful. Many thanks.

I can do that but what diags are we talking about, where would I look and for what inf? Thanks.