[Clover vs Opencore and CPU capabilities]

Okay great thanks, I have managed to switch out the clover EFI folder for opencore and it boots at least, although my VNC keyboard doesn't work yet...I'll spend some time reading up around it and how to configure stuff like serial numbers etc.

 

Thanks.

[Clover vs Opencore and CPU capabilities]

I have a working MacOS VM running with unRAID being used as a desktop and it is great. I have iMessage, full iCloud, Radeon RX570 passsthrough all working thanks to SpaceInvader's brilliant Macinabox docker to get things going.  Reading around as I haven't looked at Mac VMs for some time there seems to be a move away from Clover to Opencore these days. I am not sure what advantages that brings though - is it worth moving to it, what would I gain?

 

One thing I am interested in is making sure that the VM is using all the latest CPU capabilities to the full. I am currently in Penryn mode in my XML and as I understand there are a lot of potential performance gains to be had by implementing something newer. At this point though I don't know if I can simply pass through my 8th gen i5 and it should work seamlessly or I need to do something else? and whether this has to do with opencore or not?!

 

 

[AMD and NVME passthrough, both work but not at same time?]

So I have an RX570 and a Samsung PM951 SSD. I have Windows installed to the NVME drive with VNC just fine. It boots, no issues. If I passthrough the AMD card - nothing.

I also have a Windows VM based on an image file - I can pass the AMD card to that just fine.

Both VMs are the same Q35 chipset and Seabios set on them. I just can’t get the graphics passthrough to work at the same time as the NVME. Both devices are completely separate in terms of IOMMU groupings in system devices.

 

Host machine is set to UEFI (not sure if this matters)

 

Any ideas?

 

[5700 XT Passthrough issues, now OVMF VMs boot into UEFI]

Did you ever get this working? I have the same issue, I have a Win 10 install running on an NVMe passed through to the VM. With VNC it works fine, with my Radeon RX570 passed through I just get a UEFI shell. My unraid is running in UEFI mode.

[WireGuard quickstart]

On 1/14/2020 at 12:08 PM, bonienl said:

If all is pingable then routing-wise everything is in place.

I suspect something on a higher level is blocking the communication, hence my firewall hint.

Okay I feel pretty stupid now. Checking the key values I can see I never managed to generate a prehared key. Once I did that it all started working.

 

I tried with NAT off and it worked for a few secods then stopped even though I have a static route in place. With Nat on it just works so I'll just stick with that as I haveno dockers with custom IPs running anyway.

[WireGuard quickstart]

18 minutes ago, bonienl said:

Is the remote peer a Windows machine?

Could be a firewall issue, try to disable temporary and see if that makes a difference.

 

No I am experiencing the same issue on a Mac and on an iPhone as well. Are there any route settings I need to set within unRaid as well or just on my router?

[WireGuard quickstart]

9 hours ago, bonienl said:

Can you ping the DNS IP address 192.168.44.254 ?

Otherwise try DNS 8.8.8.8

 

I can ping the unraid box and I can ping the router/DNS address. I have tried setting 8.8.8.8 on the client and that doesn't work either.

[WireGuard quickstart]

I am struggling with this. I am trying to get a tunnel so all of my traffic goes through Wireguard. I am connecting okay and can access my unRaid server and other servers on the main LAN just fine. I can't access any internet sites though. It feels like a DNS issue but I think I have it all setup as I should.

 

uNRAID IP: 192.168.44.10

Router/DNS : 192.168.44.254

 

Wireguard config:-

 

 

Router static route:-

 

 

[Mac access on SMB won't work for private shares]

[Mac access on SMB won't work for private shares]

I am finding that unless I open up the shares so they are secure as opposed to private - i.e. guest has read only then the Mac won't connect to them? I get the dreaded "The operation can't be completed because the original item for 'myfolder' can't be found"

 

Anyone got any ideas how to get SMB working correctly on Macs. I've got a few smart devices in the home now and would like to tighten up security on my shares so you can't read what is on them without username and password.

[Unraid 14th Birthday Case Badge Giveaway]

Happy birthday unraid, love the product.

[[4Sale] [UK] 14 core E5-2695 v3, ASRock Extreme 6 X99 mobo, 80GB DDR4 ECC RAM]

I have a super powerful CPU, mobo and RAM bundle here that would make a great home server, I have used it as an unRAID server for about 18 months or so but am downsizing.

I have used this rig for running unRAID with dockers and VMs. When running VMs you can do GPU pass-through and I've had really powerful multi-core Mac Pro desktop running as well as a gaming VM with a GTX 1060 passed through. It's an absolute beast. Great for running multiple VMs as a home lab.

ASRock X99 Extreme 6 ATX motherboard
Intel Xeon E5-2695 v3 14 core/28 thread CPU
80GB !! (5 x 16GB, 4 Crucial and 1 SKHynix) of ECC DDR4 2133 memory

Motherboard specs:-
On-board dual LAN
Supports up to 128GB RAM
Ultra M.2 slot
8 RAM Slots

Intel Xeon E5-2695 v3 14 core/28 thread CPU. This is a late stepping engineering sample indistinguishable from retail. The v3 Xeons had a "bug" from Intel where using patched Microcode you can bypass the usual turbo boost restrictions to have all the cores running at single core boost speeds. In this case you can have all 14 cores running at 3.3GHz. The ASRock motherboard already has the patched BIOS in place so all you have to do it plug and play.

If you wish to go back to stock, simply update the motherboard with the latest BIOS from ASRock from within the BIOS itself. I will supply the patched BIOS anyway so you can always go back. As long as you have a decent CPU cooler then it is fine. even at full tilt my CPU never went over 60 deg. Although I did this for interest sake, my server sat idling 99% of the time anyway so a bit of a waste for me

Here is the Anandtech thread where it was all discovered and people built the mods:-
Page 3 - What controls Turbo Core in Xeons?

Also here is an explanation of all core vs single core boosts :
Actual CPU Speeds - What You See Is Not Always What You Get

I am after £500 - looking at current prices on ebay especially RAM which is crazy right now, this lot is worth about £800 or so, so I think this is a good price.

[High CPU when idling]

Okay did a bit of digging and found this thread:-

 

https://askubuntu.com/questions/1033985/kvm-high-host-cpu-load-after-upgrading-vm-to-windows-10-1803

 

<clock offset='localtime'>
  <timer name='rtc' tickpolicy='catchup'/>
  <timer name='pit' tickpolicy='delay'/>
  <timer name='hpet' present='yes'/>
  <timer name='hypervclock' present='yes'/>
</clock>

All much better now, apparently the hpet line is important

[High CPU when idling]

I also get a fair amount of CPU usage when all I have is a single VM suspended? If I actually stop it properly then the CPU drops off. I thought suspended meant basically hibernate?

 

UPDATE: okay read the redhat docs on this and suspend just suspends in RAM aso I could see how some CPU is used if qemu is still running in the background. I need to set my scripts to do a managedsave instead. I still have the initial issue though. Given that CPU usage is still high when suspended I think I must have a lot of ambient CPU use by qemu itself for some reason.

[VNC mouse cursor]

This might be related to the fact I am using a Dell XPS touch screen device. However I found that rather than try to use the popup VNC window, I copy the URL from the address bar of the popup and open a new tab with that URL then the cursor starts working again. Might be useful for someone.

[High CPU when idling]

I have recently downsized my unRAID server to an i5 8400 6 core CPU. However I noticed that when running a Windows 10 VM, the CPU usage seems quite high. If I use "top" in an unRAID ssh session it shows qemu-system-x86 as the highest consumption. On the dashboard I can see one of the cores running at 45% and the others moving around 5-15% up and down. The actual VM is doing nothing and task manager in Windows 10 shows 99% idle. My previous 14 core Xeon never used to do this at all, if the WIndows VM was idle then so was the server largely.

 

Any ideas?

[Downgrade help]

My current setup is in my signature but I am not utilising it as much as I thought I would. I want to downgrade to a more power efficient rig, sell the graphics card and just run dockers and the odd VM. My current system idles at about 100W.

 

So as I see it my approaches are (1) just change my 14 core E5 processor to a lower power v4 one and see if I can tweak BIOS settings etc, perhaps implement sleep hours during the night and so on to lower general running costs. Alternatively (2) replace the motherboard, CPU and memory with something else like a modern Pentium Gold or 8th gen i3 (for Plex transcoding)

 

I am based in the UK and pay about 14p per kW/h.

 

Any ideas? I don't think I can re-use my memory with a 1151 motherboard and i3 so would need to sell that and buy some more. My E5 is one where I have BIOS unlocked it to get an all-core boost of 3.2GHz across all 14 cores. It would be nice to have hardware transcoding as I share my library with friends and it often transcodes.

 

[NVMe passthrough vs image and M.2 drives]

Yes I have just juggled things about with my existing storage for now and have passed it through just like any other PCI device. Seems to work very well.

[NVMe passthrough vs image and M.2 drives]

I am trying to work out the best way to expand my space for VMs. I have a single M.2 slot currently with a 1TB NVMe drive, I can swap that out for a 2TB but would need to use images for everything.

Alternatively I could just purchase the extra 2TB for everything and use a PCI adapter (although that seems fraught with something called m-key and b-key?!) but for my gaming VM use pass-through on the 1TB.

 

How much performance difference would there be?

 

I am running out of space for an extra PCI card, ideally a combo USB-3/M.2 card to host the 2TB would be best but struggling to find one which support NVMe drives.

 

[VNC mouse cursor]

Thanks for the hint but it didn't resolve it for me. Was that a mouse theme you chose or a specific mouse state you increased?

[VNC mouse cursor]

On a Windows 10 client machine using VNC in the browser, my mouse cursor always disappears making it really hard to use VNC. Anyone else get this?

[[Support] binhex - Plex]

I just tried moving from the limetech image to this one and once I'd fiddled to match the config folder structure it all worked fine. However I'm getting the odd transcoding error viewing a film on an iPad that doesn't happen with the limetech one? Any ideas as to what the cause could be?

[[Plugin] rclone]

I have a strange issue, I have rclone setup for OneDrive as well as Dropbox. Both appear to work correctly, I can SSH to my server and see files in both. I have a sabnzbd script which processes certain downloads and moves them into a folder in DropBox which works fine. As soon as I change the location to the same named folder in OneDrive is fails with permission denied.

 

Not too sure how to go about diagnosing it. Looking at the detailed ls output they are both showing drwxrwxrwx

[Mobile access to web ui]

18 hours ago, trurl said:

Do you know there is an app for that?

 

 

 

Yes and I've got that app but it also has issues in not connecting fairly often as well

 

[Mobile access to web ui]

I am finding I often get issues accessing the web gui on a mobile device. I have an Android phone and it happens whether I use Chrome or Firefox or OPera. Sometimes it is okay if I quit all the browsers and clear cookies. It is almost like it gets in some sort of 401 loop and then gives up so not sure if related to basic auth. Anyone else ever experience this?