planetwilson

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Posts posted by planetwilson

  1. I am using an MacOS VM for a daily driver as I decided it was better to go with an unRAID MacOS VM for home use and a 12" MacBook for travelling with than buy an expensive MacBook Pro given already have a capable unRAID machine available to me.

     

    One thing I was hoping to avoid though was excessive power usage by having the VM on all the time. Do you think it would use minimal extra resource if I left it on? It isn't as if I would be taking it when not using the VM. I could let it sleep of course but then it won't work through the normal press key or move the mouse type behaviour, I would need to go onto a different device , log into unRAID and start the VM up from the suspend state.

     

    I have been toying with the idea of a simple iOS app or web app that could do this as a simple button click but it starts to get complex in writing a plugin or docker node app to use libvirt to manage VMs etc. I was after quick and easy! :)

     

    so am I worrying about nothing?

     

  2. On 7/19/2018 at 5:24 AM, steve1977 said:

    I just realized that iMessenger and potentially also playing songs in itunes does not appear to work for me.

     

    Has anyone experience with this? There are quite some guides on the net how to fix the iMessenger issue. Would love to hear from anyone who has tried in an Unraid setup.

     

    I've done this a few times now but recently my High Sierra refused to allow me to activate iMessage (only later I realised it was to do with the network card ordering mentioned below). I ended up just rebuilding the VM from scratch. The best guide I have found is here:-

     

    https://www.tonymacx86.com/threads/an-idiots-guide-to-imessage.196827/

     

    If you use a fresh VM then you need not do all the clearing of the library folders, otherwise clean out the ones mentioned in the article. Having a proper serial number and board UUID is also required, the guide takes you through it. You need one that Apple says is invalid as it just means it hasn't been registered yet (a good thing). Ensure if using an existing VM you have signed into iCloud with that you remove it from your list of devices via Find my device on the iCloud site.

     

    One thing is *really* important and that is that the ethernet connection it set as eth0. If you only have the virtual network adapter then it should be fine but if you have a wifi card as well for handoff then sometimes it can get mixed up. 

     

    Also remember that using UI mode in unRAID causes manual edits to disappear from the XML. I sometimes forget this and then waste a few hours before realising.

     

    If you follow the steps in that article though it should be fine...

    • Like 2
  3. On 6/9/2018 at 1:02 PM, lixe said:

    I seem to recall that someone was able to passthrough a single RX 580 GPU? Just selecting it in the vm setup brings a black picture and this error in the logs:

     

    2018-06-09T12:01:20.045524Z qemu-system-x86_64: -device vfio-pci,host=09:00.0,id=hostdev0,bus=pci.0,addr=0x5: Failed to mmap 0000:09:00.0 BAR 0. Performance may be slow

     

    After that I downloaded the vbios from techpowerup, now I get this (plenty of times):

     

    2018-06-09T11:57:01.803852Z qemu-system-x86_64: vfio_region_write(0000:09:00.0:region0+0x13168, 0x0,8) failed: Device or resource busy

     

    The monitor just says "Graphic Console" or something like that.

     

    I've also tried a windows vm and its exactly the same...

     

    PS of course my IOMMU groups are absolutely fine.

     

     

    EDIT: had to disable UEFI boot and use Legacy instead, found it by chance in an other topic. So now without vbios file -> no picture, with vbios file -> I get a picture! But with serious display errors, both in win and mac.

     

    I had an RX480 which is very similar and it worked fine without any graphical artifacts. The biggest issue though was the reset bug with AMD cards. If you reboot the VM then the card doesn't re-initialize properly and you have to hard reset the host. It was a complete PITA. There are work arounds when using Windows VMs which involve using startup and shutdown scripts to try to get the card to reset correctly but I ever got them to work. Whatever small issues I had with Nvidia before that were nowhere near as annoying so I switched back to a 1060.

  4. I had exactly the same symptom with both an nvidia and an amd card. I had two VM configs set up pointing to the same image though and realised they had different MAC/Ethernet addresses set up on the bridge adapter in the VM XML and wondered if that caused Windows to treat them as different adapters?

     

     

     

  5. 52 minutes ago, 1812 said:

    was the sapphire plug and play?

     

    yes it was, no rom dumps were needed. I don't have any onboard graphics, this is the only card in the system and working on OSX and Windows perfectly. Well actually there is no HDMI sound but I don't think that is this card as my previous GTX950 started doing that recently and I've read a lot of people saying the same thing. I use some USB based external speakers so not an issue for me until it gets fixed.

  6. On 14/04/2018 at 12:46 PM, planetwilson said:

     

    I am using this card https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MDLG51U/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

     

    The NVMe drive has nothing else running off it, dockers are all on the cache drive which is a normal HDD.

     

    I have also just now tried emulator pinning to first pair and assigning the last 8 pairs to the VM and it does seem to have improved things. Still not amazing though considering the resources it has. I'll do a little more digging....

     

     

     

    So in the end I have upgraded from the GTX 950 to a Sapphire Nitro+ RX480 8GB. The whole thing is now running much better.

  7. I think I know the answer to my question but here goes...I am trying to work out the best bang for buck in upgrading my unRAID server for VMs.

     

    I currently have a 14 core E5-2695 v3 Xeon with a 2.3GHz base clock. I could sell that and replace with an E5-2687W v4 12 core but a base clock of 3.0GHz, prob cost about 250-300 overall as an upgrade. I think the v4s are pretty power efficient so wouldn’t expect it to use much more idling than my v3.

     

    Alternatively I could upgrade my GTX950 with an ATI RX580 (4GB or 8GB unsure whether worth going for 8) for maybe 150-200 after selling the old card.

     

    Most of the time the CPU sits idle as it is acting as a server but then I also play games on it or use a Mac desktop as well both of which would benefit from an upgrade.(I think the 580 is pretty well supported on Mac)

     

    I am after some better game performance as well as desktop performance but I suspect the CPU gains are probably marginal compared to the over 2x increase if I went GPU upgrade...

     

    Any advice?

     

     

    Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

  8. I am getting this as well. My Windows VM which has worked for months has recently stopped working with a code 43. Tried uninstalling the drivers and reinstalling them. I noticed that my VM config now said HyperV was on (no idea what it said previously, was this changed in a recent unRAID release?) so I turned that off but still not working. I am using a bios dump that I have used previously with no issues.

  9. On 29/01/2018 at 3:46 PM, gridrunner said:

     

    How I have mine set up is -- 

    I have a powered usb 3.0 hub which has all of my devices keyboard mouse usb drives bluetooth etc. This then connects to a 4 port USB 3 switch which connects to 4 different computers (well 3 really as 2 of them are the server)

    1 connects to the unRAID servers main 'unpassed through' usb port

    1 connects to the passed through usb card for vms (osx etc)

    1 connects to my other server

    1 connects to my laptop

     

    Everything works through the hub for all devices but again a powered hub.

     

     

     

    I am using this card https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B01MDLG51U/ref=oh_aui_search_detailpage?ie=UTF8&psc=1

     

    The NVMe drive has nothing else running off it, dockers are all on the cache drive which is a normal HDD.

     

    I have also just now tried emulator pinning to first pair and assigning the last 8 pairs to the VM and it does seem to have improved things. Still not amazing though considering the resources it has. I'll do a little more digging....

     

     

    • Like 1
  10. On 20/03/2018 at 8:21 PM, 1812 said:

     

    it should also work if you don't declare a topology (and be faster) since osx won't kneecap one of the hypertheaded pairs.

     

    I have tried with a topology and without and still find things are a bit sluggish. I wanted to pass 8 physical cores (16 HT) to the VM from a total of 14 that I have, leaving the remaining ones to unRAID. Just wondering if there is something else I can try to make things snappier?

     

    I am passing through a usb3 PCI card as well as the recommended wifi/BT card and they are all working perfectly with handoff etc. Also passing through a GTX950 which is working fine as well with nvidia drivers. The VM itself is running off a Samsung NVMe drive so I would have thought it should all run nicely. It just seems sluggish in everything takes a half second to respond to clicks or load web pages etc.

     

    <domain type='kvm' xmlns:qemu='http://libvirt.org/schemas/domain/qemu/1.0'>
      <name>MWiMac</name>
      <uuid>678ff6cb-bde5-e84b-e3ef-9ce17eb47a53</uuid>
      <metadata>
        <vmtemplate xmlns="unraid" name="Linux" icon="linux.png" os="linux"/>
      </metadata>
      <memory unit='KiB'>25165824</memory>
      <currentMemory unit='KiB'>25165824</currentMemory>
      <memoryBacking>
        <nosharepages/>
      </memoryBacking>
      <vcpu placement='static'>16</vcpu>
      <cputune>
        <vcpupin vcpu='0' cpuset='1'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='1' cpuset='15'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='2' cpuset='3'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='3' cpuset='17'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='4' cpuset='5'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='5' cpuset='19'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='6' cpuset='7'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='7' cpuset='21'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='8' cpuset='9'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='9' cpuset='23'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='10' cpuset='11'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='11' cpuset='25'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='12' cpuset='12'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='13' cpuset='26'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='14' cpuset='13'/>
        <vcpupin vcpu='15' cpuset='27'/>
      </cputune>
      <os>
        <type arch='x86_64' machine='pc-q35-2.11'>hvm</type>
        <loader readonly='yes' type='pflash'>/usr/share/qemu/ovmf-x64/OVMF_CODE-pure-efi.fd</loader>
        <nvram>/etc/libvirt/qemu/nvram/678ff6cb-bde5-e84b-e3ef-9ce17eb47a53_VARS-pure-efi.fd</nvram>
      </os>
      <features>
        <acpi/>
        <apic/>
      </features>
      <cpu mode='host-passthrough' check='none'>
        <topology sockets='8' cores='1' threads='2'/>
      </cpu>
      <clock offset='utc'>
        <timer name='rtc' tickpolicy='catchup'/>
        <timer name='pit' tickpolicy='delay'/>
        <timer name='hpet' present='no'/>
      </clock>
      <on_poweroff>destroy</on_poweroff>
      <on_reboot>restart</on_reboot>
      <on_crash>restart</on_crash>
      <devices>
        <emulator>/usr/local/sbin/qemu</emulator>
        <disk type='file' device='disk'>
          <driver name='qemu' type='raw' cache='writeback'/>
          <source file='/mnt/disks/VMNVM/MWiMac/vdisk2.img'/>
          <target dev='hdc' bus='sata'/>
          <boot order='1'/>
          <address type='drive' controller='0' bus='0' target='0' unit='2'/>
        </disk>
        <controller type='usb' index='0' model='ich9-ehci1'>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x7'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='usb' index='0' model='ich9-uhci1'>
          <master startport='0'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x0' multifunction='on'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='usb' index='0' model='ich9-uhci2'>
          <master startport='2'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x1'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='usb' index='0' model='ich9-uhci3'>
          <master startport='4'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x07' function='0x2'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='sata' index='0'>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x1f' function='0x2'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='0' model='pcie-root'/>
        <controller type='pci' index='1' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='1' port='0x8'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x0' multifunction='on'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='2' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='2' port='0x9'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x1'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='3' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='3' port='0xa'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x2'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='4' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='4' port='0xb'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x3'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='5' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='5' port='0xc'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x4'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='6' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='6' port='0xd'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x5'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='7' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='7' port='0xe'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x6'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='pci' index='8' model='pcie-root-port'>
          <model name='pcie-root-port'/>
          <target chassis='8' port='0xf'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x00' slot='0x01' function='0x7'/>
        </controller>
        <controller type='virtio-serial' index='0'>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x02' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
        </controller>
        <interface type='bridge'>
          <mac address='52:54:00:64:9d:cd'/>
          <source bridge='br0'/>
          <model type='e1000-82545em'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x01' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
        </interface>
        <serial type='pty'>
          <target type='isa-serial' port='0'>
            <model name='isa-serial'/>
          </target>
        </serial>
        <console type='pty'>
          <target type='serial' port='0'/>
        </console>
        <channel type='unix'>
          <target type='virtio' name='org.qemu.guest_agent.0'/>
          <address type='virtio-serial' controller='0' bus='0' port='1'/>
        </channel>
        <input type='mouse' bus='ps2'/>
        <input type='keyboard' bus='ps2'/>
        <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>
          <driver name='vfio'/>
          <source>
            <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x02' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
          </source>
          <rom file='/mnt/disks/VMNVM/gtx950.rom'/>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x03' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
        </hostdev>
        <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>
          <driver name='vfio'/>
          <source>
            <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x02' slot='0x00' function='0x1'/>
          </source>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x04' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
        </hostdev>
        <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>
          <driver name='vfio'/>
          <source>
            <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x06' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
          </source>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x05' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
        </hostdev>
        <hostdev mode='subsystem' type='pci' managed='yes'>
          <driver name='vfio'/>
          <source>
            <address domain='0x0000' bus='0x07' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
          </source>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x06' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
        </hostdev>
        <memballoon model='virtio'>
          <address type='pci' domain='0x0000' bus='0x07' slot='0x00' function='0x0'/>
        </memballoon>
      </devices>
      <qemu:commandline>
        <qemu:arg value='-usb'/>
        <qemu:arg value='-device'/>
        <qemu:arg value='usb-mouse,bus=usb-bus.0'/>
        <qemu:arg value='-device'/>
        <qemu:arg value='usb-kbd,bus=usb-bus.0'/>
        <qemu:arg value='-smbios'/>
        <qemu:arg value='type=2'/>
        <qemu:arg value='-cpu'/>
        <qemu:arg value='Penryn,vendor=GenuineIntel,kvm=on,+invtsc,+avx,+avx2,+aes,+xsave,+xsaveopt,vmware-cpuid-freq=on,'/>
      </qemu:commandline>
    </domain>

     

  11. On 21/02/2018 at 8:30 AM, steve1977 said:

    I am using the MacOS VM now quite successfully for a while. It seems to me that things work flawless as long as I don't pass-through a GPU, which appears to be trickier. So, I just decided to work without to keep things more stable and not requiring too much tinkering along the way.

     

    There remains one thing that still feels a bit less elegant, which is around Clover. Maybe you'll have some thoughts whether this can be improved. Not mission critical, but would make it a nicer setup:

     

    1) When I start the VM, I still have a Clover menu, which allows to start the VM or do a bunch of other things related to Clover. Is this menu necessary or could the VM be setup that it always boots directly in the VM? Basically same as with a Win VM, where there is also no additional setup menu when starting up the VM

     

    2) I installed the Clover version that was released in December. While I like xmas, it is starting to irritate to me to be welcomed by a xmas tree everytime I start my Mac VM. If not possible to get fully rid of the menu (1), is there a possibility to change the picture?

     

    Thanks for your help!

     

    I know that if you use the EFI mounter to have a look in the Clover folder there is a theme folder somewhere. You can just remove the xmas theme and you should be left with the default one. Pretty sure there will be a config for the other thing but not had time to check sorry.