edgeinterface

For time being I switched back to bare metal win10. I don't think type1 hypervisor environment is for me right now. All the issues with locked devices when switching between vms and lack of sharing basic devices like mouse keyboard and sound card made my daily use of computer more problematic than it's worth. That's not a fault of unraid but rather me not really understanding how things work. I will keep my unraid usb stick and will keep checking out what's happening but for now I'm giving up.

Yep, that sounds exactly like what I would want to have. If that's only a matter of know-how it's good because probably somebody knows how and maybe will do it

Hi, My current and biggest gripe with unraid is that to be able to run 2 VMs at the same time I need to double up on every hardware I want to use in those VMs. I googled stuff like "kvm sharing devices" but didn't find anything that could hint it is possible to do. So either my google-fu sucks or that's not the way KVM works or maybe it's just not how all type1 hypervisors work. What I thought I will get when switching from bare metal Windows to unraid? Well, I hoped to have work VM running and my home/gaming VM running at the same time. I hoped I could use same sound card and same webcam on both of them so when my friend calls me on my private skype I would be able to answer as well as I could have calls with my work team mates on my work skype in my work VM. But reality is different. I need to run either work VM or home VM. And very often when I switch between them by shutdown in current and starting up the other I get boot issues which I guess stem from devices not being properly released by first VM. So I have to reboot whole system. I guess what I was expecting was VirtualBox on steroids. Seamless virtualization environment but with real GPU where I need it. I hoped everything else to be as easy as in VirtualBox. Need a sound card? Sure, here's emulated one. Need real one? Sure, here's list of your devices, please select one. Even if I had to use command line to do it I wouldn't complain because I would get what I want and need to have to not feel pain every time I need to jump from one VM to another. I expected more power and capabilities but it seems like what I got is just more issues than it's worth. Just to be clear: I don't blame unraid or kvm or anybody here. When tool is not right for the work it's not tool to blame. I think unard is great when used as it was meant to be used but I would like to know if my needs can even be met in kvm world in general (for example would it be possible when running KVM in Fedora or other Linux OS?) or I should just get back to VirtualBox and stop whining? I would really appreciate the answer because right now I kind of wasted a lot of time to have stuff setup but the more I try to like it the more problems I discover and I really think about installing my Win10 on bare metal and get back to my boring but free of such issues.

You can do normal shutdown / restart / whatever from Start -> Power menu in Win10. You can also do Stop / Restart of VM from webGui and that should issue Shutdown / Restart signal to guest OS but why would you do that when you already are in that guest OS? Regarding applications installed in Win10 you can put them wherever you want. I personally put all applicaions on VM's vdisk (resize vdisk when needed more space) while documents, media files, etc. go to share that all VMs have access to. Installing applications to separate vdisk makes no sense because you need that disk space anyway and when VM gets corrupted and you need to reinstall OS you will need to install them again, right? I think stopping array stops VMs by sending Stop to them but maybe that's just wishful thinking, I never checked it myself.

Ah, little detail I missed. Oh well, let's hope it will be released and pulled into unraid in some near-ish future. Would be one less thing to duplicate when you want / need to run 2 VMs with real hardware.

I think preparing "base" VM helps a lot in the long run so you don't have to start from scratch every time you decide you need another VM with that OS. I have 25GB "base" Win10 VM with all stuff I will need in every VM created out of it (so all updates at the time of creation, devices, drivers, applications like skype, slack, notepad++, windows commander, etc.). It's also activated Win10 so I wouldn't have issues when I clone it (I have several keys from kinguin but only used one so not leeching anything, money got paid). That VM initially had 150GB vdisk but then I realized that's silly because copying that vdisk around takes some time even on ssd. Also not every VM will need so much space. So I cleaned up what I could within Win10 (like 9GB of Windows.old even though I did new clean installation not an upgrade) and got under 20GB with all files. So I shrunk it to 25GB and now I can spawn new "clone" in matter of seconds. Now I have private VM resized to 50GB and work VM resized to 100GB. Also another 50GB VM hosting MSSQL server and IIS I use for my work and private development projects. Also I think good idea is to put your VMs vdisks on out of array SSD, not on cache SSD (xfs is much better for running VMs than btrfs). Thing that a lot of newbies lured to unRaid by Linus and his "X gamers, 1 CPU" videos misses when they configure their setups Just install Unassigned Devices plugin, mount SSD not added to array and that's all.

Not sure if that was posted already but take a look here: http://vfio.blogspot.com/2016/07/intel-graphics-assignment.html If I'm reading it right but iGPU pass-through seems to be possible. Also "I've been told this works with Skylake" makes me kind of happy since I have i7-6700K and it would be nice to be able to put that iGPU to some work more serious than just showing webui from time to time. So should it work on current unRaid version (I run 6.2.0.rc2) or that article is only applicable for "normal" linux systems?

Well, if there's UI mode why wouldn't I want to use it? I can run unRaid without it but is that how it should be? It got broken in very mysterious way but that's fine because real man ssh? Anyway, looks like now everything works again. I didn't change anything in BIOS or hardware but after few restarts new copy of unRaid booted up into webGUI without any issues. Then I just copied config files from old installation to this new one and I have everything configured as it was. Just as it messed itself up it fixed itself as well. Very frikking trustworthy.

I'm running memtest right now. Other weird things started to happen. I restarted unRaid and when I booted up webGUI showed me registration page even though I had still 13 days of trial left. I requested another trial but when I pasted url to key it failed to download it. Also all my configuration of shares and assigned drives was gone, everything looked just like fresh installation. So I formatted my pendrive and copied unRaid files again and after that trial key was downloaded successfully. But those issues with displaying unRaid UI are still occurring. memtest is at 55% now, running test #10[Modulo 20, Random Pattern]. No errors found yet and I really doubt there will be any. This is exactly stuff that was keeping me from committing fully to unRaid. Weird issues with system that as all Linuxes is fking mess when it gets corrupted. And it got corrupted by god knows what. I guess I won't invest any money into license any time soon. Shame because today morning I was thinking "today is the day".

Hi, I started my unraid after a break of a week or 2 and I have some weird issues with how it displays itself on my screen. I didn't change any hardware or BIOS options (except setting up boot from unraid usb and switching to iGFX from Auto). I took a picture of how logging screen looks like. As you can see at the bottom of a screen there's an area of "pixel noise" and if you look closer at the top you will see that that bottom part is drawn there but with some kind of shift to the left (notice that green-ish vertical 'flare' starting at login editbox and where is is at the top of the screen) When I log in bottom part becomes black and webGUI is drawing like it was early '70s not a frikking Skylake iGPU. Top of the screen continues to display bottom part but without shit to the left. And when I move mouse cursor over it it gets redrawn with what should be there: tabs of web browser that is showing webGUI. And I also don't have access to that "start menu" that allows to start Midnight Commander and terminal. Anybody has any idea WTF? It really was working fine last time I was using it. And when I connect from my laptop there's no problems with speed or layout of webGUI so it must be something local to server. Something wrong with graphics drivers or sth?

Please forgive me for this necro but I wonder how did Linus connect multiple keyboards and mice to that one machine? Was it with wireless usb receivers as logitech has passed through to VMs? I don't think there was enough usb ports to connect 14 devices or was it? And what about sound? I recon hdmi audio from each GPU was playing but what if player would like to use mics to talk? 7 pci sound cards pci wouldn't fit since GPUs took 7 PCI slots already and how many more 1x/2x/4x that mobo could have? So again usb stuff? Some kind of virtual sound cards inside VMs? Could you share some more sikrets?

@jonathanm I am like Jon Snow, I know nuthin' I will try this later but just for sake of clarity can you explain how this thing affects VMs using snapshots instead of "real" copied of vdisk? with regular separate vdisk files I can simply increase their sizes and when I enable additional space in Disk Management windows will just see it. Does it work differently when using reflink and snapshots? Or am I completely missing the point?

Yeah, snapshot, attach to Vm, profit. That's kind of awesome that it's actually little bit scary So if I understand it correctly to use this for my VMs which are residing in "cache only" usershare on SSD I have to: format my cache SSDs as BTRFS create my VM vdisk not as raw but as qcow2 Does having cache SSD formatted as BTRFS changes anything for normal cache related unRaid operations? Should I maybe have separate SSDs for my magical snapshotted VMs and for "cache"?

Let me repeat what was said in that quoted thread: Mind f-ing blown Right now I have 4 Win10 VMs, each with 30GB vdisk which I basically copied from initial VM after I managed to set up everything for it (usb passthrough, all Win updates, initial win configuration, etc.). So I have 120GB taken for those vdisks. And now it seems that I could just use that reflink voodoo and have most of that space actually free to use? And any change would just be local to particular VM without affecting others? That is some crazy sh!t going on.

One common / base vdisk for all VMs and each of them maintaining their own "diff disk"? Sounds too cool to be true but I would love such feature

It kind of depends on whether your dual-boot usb issues are easier to solve than setting up unRaid VMs With virtualization you might have completely new set of issues to deal with. Passing devices through is greatly dependent on your hardware and there's always a chance it won't work in your specific case even though it works for everybody else. I still didn't make a switch from my Win7 and bunch of virtualbox VMs I use for work even though I already have all my hardware ready, solved issues with passthrough of GPU and other devices and even have all the data transferred to array in unRaid. Basically what I really need to do is to add my SSDs and last HDD that Win7 uses to unRaid and I would be done. I have Win10 VMs already created and configured in unRaid, one for "work", one for "home", few for "work test lab stuff" Main thing that stops me from committing is the fact that I would have to go through the whole process of configuring my work environment. It's not hard to do but it's time consuming and when I think about this I lose my will to live Another thing that kind of bothers me is switching from Windows to Linux. I am Windows guy, I never managed to get into Linux and I tried quite a few times, I really did. I understand Windows, I know Windows, I develop software for Windows, I use Windows. unRaid is Linux and having all my home & work dependent on OS that I don't understand or know how to use / fix makes me uneasy. It's nothing concrete or even rational - in reality I can just fire up my laptop or even phone and google for solutions but it's that feeling. My post probably won't help you much but I just wanted to let you know that you are not alone in asking this kind of question

First of all OP big thanks for this guide. And also thanks to saarg for his "easy mode" with <hostdev> Now I have my usb hub (http://www.tp-link.com/en/products/details/cat-4761_UH700.html) inside my Win10 VM and everything I plug in it gets detected right away. Webcam, dvd drive, pendrives, my Windows Phone. Life is good right now Of course there was a bit of WTF when I did all the steps to get correct bus slot and function and VM screamed at me with big error that there is no such device Fortunately for everybody I stopped myself from throwing my laptop out of window and kept browsing rest of the thread. After few minutes I had a hint of solution and it worked so here it is: By using lsusb command I established that I want to pass bus 003 through (that is the only bus that has no other usb stuff connected like unRaid pendrive or my logitech receivers for mouse & keyboard). So next I did readlink command readlink /sys/bus/usb/devices/usb3 And got this in response: ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0/0000:03:00.0/usb3 And here is where my confusion came from. After reading OP's guide I thought that hostdev should have address defined like this <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x03' slot='0x1c' function='0x0'/> using this part of readlink info ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0/0000:03:00.0/usb3 But this caused big scary error to appear when I started VM. Correct way is to use numbers from last but one part of usb3 "path" returned by readlink: ../../../devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:1c.0/0000:03:00.0/usb3 <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x03' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/> After this was done VM started up normally, Win10 detected my webcam and all other connected devices and hot plugging works perfectly.

Ok guys, passthrough works fine for my onboard audio. I just had to pay more attention to what I read on forums and what my webGUI shows me. I don't say it couldn't be more user friendly but now that I know what had to be done it's easy enough. First of all when I enabled ACS override in VM Manager it said that reboot is required for change to take effect. So I stopped array and rebooted system. What I didn't notice was that this setting wasn't really applied. After my last response I went into VM manager again just to double check and low and behold that yellow-ish warning was still there. After 3rd reboot I realized something is not working as it should here so I searched this issue. Apparently solution is to add manually some magic commands to syslinux config: After this change and reboot warning in VM manager went away so I added my onboard audio as secondary sound card to my Win10 VM and started it up. First moments were little dissapointing: windows logo showed up, then login screen, then... darkness. Ok, so now even no picture! Great! Log showed familiar errors about reset. I decided to make some green&orange tee and write another flame post about how shitty this whole thing was. When I got back few minutes later I saw Win10 desktop and some new icons in notification tray. 2 icons of speakers! 2 icons of speakers without red cross on them which meant - oh god, can it be true? - Win10 VM was detecting my headphones in my front panel? Quick run to youtube, first video and YES! the sound of some lame song that apparently is popular now blasted from my headphones. Installed skype and called test service to check if mic works too. It did. So now all that is left is to pass my whole usb hub that I use to connect pendrives, phones, webcam and dvd burner (yep I got usb one to free one sata port on my mobo for additional hdd). Final notes: - OVMF BIOS doesn't work for me. VM doesn't even blink its initial boot message, it just hangs until gets killed. So I have to use SeaBIOS. - machine i440fx-2.5 is fine - I had to enable ACS override in syslinux config, webGUI didn't work for some reason (beta 21 so maybe just some minor bug?) So, I will mark this as solved, maybe it will help some other poor guy who is not seeing things everybody seems to see. And to all guys who took a moment to respond to my posts big thank you for not leaving me alone even when I was snarky and whiny. I hope unraid will only get better and all those newbie traps will get fixed, improved, explained, described. Now I am again full of hope for nicely separating my work stuff from my play stuff and maybe finally getting that NAS and media streaming going on.

Yep, I tried that too without any luck. But will give it another try because maybe I didn't do it correctly. Also not much else I can do right now, it's almost midnight and shops with electronics are closed so I can't go and impulse buy usb sound card to pass it through

That's something that gives hope. On the other hand my "newest" chipset is already like a year old, both Skylake and Z170 are not so fresh anymore so one can only wonder what praised and proud linux community who always bolsters "thousands of improvements by millions of volunteers within mere minutes from detection" is doing? C'mon guys, prove me wrong

Thanks for your input, buying more stuff is always a possibility. I only wonder if with my luck this also won't turn up to be another 'nope' moment. Is really passthrough for onboard sound chip so crazy to implement? I don't thing those chips are so much different and Asus is not some kind of ghetto manufacturer so I can't stop to ask same question: why something so common and basic is so hard to do while you are able to passthrough whole frikking GPU which I bet is much more complex than audio IO?

That's the thing: I can see my onboard sound card in combo box but when I select it (either as the only one or as secondary to GPU's audio) my VM reports errors in log and becomes unusable (freezes, VM can't be stopped / forced stopped, host is hanging, only way to get control back is hard reset of the whole box). Error from log is like this: 2016-04-29T11:08:33.698007Z qemu-system-x86_64: vfio: Cannot reset device 0000:00:1f.3, no available reset mechanism. This device is my onboard sound card (same number is showing up in webGUI when setting up VM). I already tried both types of VM BIOS (SeaBIOS and OMVF) and there's the same issue everytime. I didn't even got into trying to install drivers for my onboard audio in VM because of freezing / hanging problems I mentioned above. My idea was to setup 2 main VMs, one for work (software development stuff + skype for work calls) and one for fun (games, movies, music, skype with friends, general relax time stuff) and maybe few other "background" VMs with sql / exchange / domino servers for "work lab environment" (those obviously wouldn't need passthrough GPU nor audio, just remote desktop for administration / maintenance stuff). But now my plan is getting more and more unrealistic since I can't get past that simple thing with audio.

Because I don't use hdmi with any of my 2 monitors (ROG SWIFT PG279Q - display port only, Dell U2412M - DVI only). And isn't hdmi audio output only anyway? How can you use skype without input? Yeah, how do you skype in unraid windows VMs world?

I won't hide that I came to unraid lured by Linus' videos featuring unraid capabilities of virtualizing Windows machines on top of NAS, PLEX, whatever. Now when I tried few things I can see that either: - it's same kind of bullshit as with any other linux I ever tried (it works for people who spent a year fiddling with config files and hacking binaries and whatever) - my hardware is so weird unraid is not able to deal with it (yeah right, i7-6700k + Asus Z170-A + MSI GTX780 this is really exotic combo nowadays) My main issue is as I stated in subject: how can you advertise unraid as a platform for hosting "gaming rig" quality VMs when something so basic as onboard audio is a total showstopper? I watched jonp giving interviews saying with straight face you can run your gaming rig on top of you NAS and entertainment server and dockers and whatnot. So what kind of gaming rig doesn't use sound card? In times of twitch, teamspeak, MMOs, youtube, etc. how can you do gaming rig without playing AND recording sound? Thing that onboard sound chip is totally capable of doing without need for external devices like usb or pci cards. So am I missing something here or it's just simple case of "well, sucks to be you, it works for us. bye"? Sorry for being jaded but I really hoped unraid will be a solution for my work and leasure IT related needs. And now it seems it's just another pipe dream.

Yeah, wasting pci for audio card seems too much. Especially that I will probably need to extend number of my sataIII connections to accommodate all my drives. Ok, thanks for confirming my fears