ckoepf
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Posts posted by ckoepf
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Hmm, ok.
1812, I did specifically say that I wasn't sure what files needed to be posted for diagnostic help. I did not go looking to find out what I had to upload as I posted that message last night before I quit for the night and today I'm on the road and won't be able to access my unraid server for testing until the end of the week.
I do indeed have a large enough power supply. It's 1000 watt which is more than sufficient for the hardware I have installed.
I should also mention that the Win10 OS did boot previously on v6.4 rc15e with the EVGA 1080ti and the Gigabyte 960 at the same time. I had not tried again until the other day as my main goal is to get 2 displays working in MacOS. I really don't need the 2nd GTX 960 in the machine, I installed it for testing purposes as the other cards will certainly power 2 displays easily for my use.
DZMM has 2 displays on a GT 730. Saarg is on AMD cards. 1812, what cards are you using? Just curious if it's something with the newer cards, higher end cards, etc. Like I said, Windows did boot and operate with two cards a few versions back and I just remembered that as I was reading info today.
If I have time this weekend, I will try some older versions of unraid 6.4 RC.
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I wanted to make sure this information was posted somewhere being that I really haven't seen much about dual monitors and even less when it comes to dual monitors on NVidia cards. There is a thread I found with fixes posted for AMD cards, but even that is a year old.
Anyway, my findings...... I have an Unraid server with 3 VMs on it. 2 of the VMs have passed through video cards, all of which are NVidia. I have an EVGA 1080ti, MSI GTX960 and a Gigabyte GTX960. Trying all combinations between Windows 10 and MacOS, I get the same results when trying to connect two monitors/displays to the same video card in an OS. Neither OS will boot with 2 displays connected. I have to boot both OSes with only a single display connected.
Once booted to the desktop, if I plugin a 2nd display in either OS via HDMI cable or DVI adapter to HDMI cable, I get flickering displays, snow on and off on either/both displays and sometimes both displays will go completely blank. If I pull 1 or both HDMI cables, wait a few seconds and connect 1 at a time, sometimes I can get a full dual display working.
Even if I get it working, if I were to change from extended desktop to mirror display or vice versa, I go through the same blinking, flickering, on/off, etc. and have to play with cables again to get it working. Sometimes the video card output will just give up and not output any display. The underlying OS is still running because I can connect to it with screensharing or NoMachine and access the OS, but the video card stops output any data. The only way to fix this scenario is to fully shutdown the bare metal machine and then power it back on. Even a reboot won't reset the video card to get output.
I have gone a little further in my testing to determine that the likely cause is Unraid. If I boot Win10 and MacOS, both with single displays, each on their own card and own monitor. Everything works just great. I then found AirDisplay by Avatron that will allow a Mac to extend it's desktop onto a Windows PC via a screensharing type method. A client runs on Windows as an app and receives the signal from the Mac. On Windows, you can resize the window as you please or set it to fullscreen and on the Mac you can use this as a Mirror display or extended desktop. When trying out AirDisplay, I get the same results as if I used the physical video card and tried to connect 2 physical displays to the same video card again. This leads me to believe it's an Unraid issue.
While I am pretty technical, I have not had to do much troubleshooting with Unraid and don't know for sure which files/logs would be of use to developers. I can send along my logs if necessary, but I am also running out of free time to test these things at this point, being that I have been setting up and configuring my Unraid machine for about 3-4 weeks now to use it as my daily driver desktop and gaming machine. I am able to do some more testing and post up some log files, but making major changes to anything underlying that could cause corruption or downtime on my system at this point isn't too likely.
I'm posting everything here to pass along as much information as I can and multiple scenarios. Hopefully someone else has had similar experiences and can confirm what I have found at this point and hopefully this is something that can get straightened at some point in the near future. It would be great to get my dual displays back on MacOS as that's what I use the most and what I use as my daily machine.
I am using a work around at the moment of ShareMouse to use a single keyboard and mouse between both OSes so that I can at least make some use of my 2nd display by browsing the net in Chrome on Windows, doing some file transfers and other common items between OSes. It works and is helpful, but definitely not dual displays on the same OS.
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I wanted to come back and update my information about my High Sierra VM with passthrough NVidia display card. I had mentioned previously that I was having problems with dual displays on my video card. I have done quite a bit of further testing and determined that the problem is NOT with High Sierra specifically and is likely not the NVidia web drivers either. I have the same problem if I plug a 2nd monitor into the video card passed through to my Windows 10 VM as well.
To test even futher, I came across AirDisplay by Avatron which allows a Mac to extend or Mirror it's desktop to a Windows PC. While I did manage to get it to work, it had the same blanking and flickering issues as I did with the 2 physical displays connected to the passed through card in High Sierra.
I have tested with an MSI GTX 960, Gigabyte GTX 960 and an EVGA 1080ti. All have the same problems and it doesn't matter whether it's High Sierra or Windows 10.
With that, I won't get into any more details in this thread being that it's about High Sierra in a VM. My High Sierra is working fantastic except for the dual displays.
I now have a PCIE USB-C/3.1 card that I have passed through to High Sierra. I have a new usb-c powered hub connected to it and have plenty of ports to connect anything I need to my MacOS VM as if it were a separate machine.
As a temporary solution for the lack of dual displays, I'm displaying MacOS on 1 monitor and Win10 on the other. I now use ShareMouse to use a single keyboard and mouse between both operating systems. While it's not dual displays, it does allow me to browse the internet with Chrome on my Win10 VM, I can use webmail and other online applications on Win10 and copy/past with the shared clipboard between operating systems.
Any advanced users that are using their MacOS VM as their daily driver as I am, this seems to be working pretty well. If you are ONLY using MacOS and want true dual displays, you CAN manage to get it to work if you fiddle with the HDMI or DVI connections on the graphics card. I have managed to get the full dual display working for a couple days at a time, but as soon as I want to play a game in Windows and switch my MacOS display to Mirrored it starts the flickering issues all over again and I have to play with cables and resolutions to get the display back to normal. I've chosen my temporary option for now until Limetech gets dual displays fixed up a bit better.
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planetwilson, see my message a few back about the update. You HAVE to select the right boot option on clover or it won't work. I said that I was having exactly the same problem.
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Spx404, do some searches or read through this message thread. Well I don’t remember what the answer is, I could swear that there was something posted about what to do if that happens. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’m pretty sure. If not, I’m sure someone on here can make a suggestion.
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Has anyone been having any weird oddities with their NVIDIA GPU in High Sierra? I definitely can’t boot MacOS with 2 displays connected. With a single display, it loads and works fine, but then occasionally the display will just go black for 4-5 seconds and then come back on. Once in a while, the display actually go black and then my screen says there’s no signal. This is with only 1 connected. To correct it, I have to pull the HDMI cable for a few seconds and plug it back in.
2 Displays has some oddities too after the OS loads. Whether on mirror or not, when plugging in the 2nd display the screens will only sometimes go to snow, then black, then back to snow and then to the proper display. Sometimes I need to pull cables and plug them back in to get the correct display.
I love everything else about this install, but the video issues are just weird and can be annoying. I’d post this elsewhere, but I’m assuming the problems with the display are related to High Sierra being that I’m having issues with single display and everyone says Sierra works perfect. I have not seen any threads specific to High Sierra and NVIDIA gpu passthrough problems.
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Anyone have any luck with dual monitors? After my last post, I have ALL of my passthrough hardware working correctly. I passed through one of the USB controller on my motherboard and that is working wonderfully. I passed through 2 different NVIDIA GTX 960 video cards. 1 is an MSI and the other is a Gigabyte and have had the same results with both cards. If I boot with a single display connected, everything works as expected. If I boot with 2 displays plugged in, after the apple logo loading screen, the displays go blank and say there is no signal. If I boot single display and then hotplug the second display, I have to play games with the hotplugging to get them to work. They go snow, then 1 will show the desktop, then snow, then the other shows the desktop. Eventually, after 3 or 4 tries, I can et both displays to work correctly.
If anyone else has any experiences with dual monitors and/or knows of a fix or somewhere to look, please let me know. I did do a couple of searches, but didn't find anything specifically related to High Sierra. I also found some details about AMD cards, but not NVIDIA.
I must say that I am extremely happy otherwise with my build. I have an Unraid server, my game machine and my daily Mac desktop all on 1 piece of hardware and it's all running really smooth and snappy. The graphics performance on both operating systems is phenomenal, even when using both at the same time. I have not noticed any drive performance issues either, even when copying some pretty large files over from my old gaming PC and still working on my Mac install at the same time.
Thanks so much for your information and guidance gridrunner.
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On 12/7/2017 at 9:45 AM, david279 said:
Update successful.....Ran update selected the install from HD selection in clover. It installs then boots right back up. Installed the alternate graphic drivers and everythings all good. Will try updating clover now.
Thank you for the info David! I've been trying to get my Mac VM installed and running since Sunday. Probably tried 15 times since then to get the 10.13.2 update to work. VERY IMPORTANT TIP for anyone else...... You have to use the "Install from <Hard Drive>" option at the Clover menu for this to complete right. I'm no expert with Clover, but all the other attempts, I let it do the automatic selection with the Preboot Install option and it always hung with the progress bar about 1/8 of the way across.
For informational purposes, this was a clean install of High Sierra following the video. No custom anything until I got the update to run. I tried q35-2.9 and 2.10. I tried multiple Clover versions starting at 4200 up to the current of 4334. Nothing had any affect until I tried the "Install from HD" menu option in Clover.
I've also had mixed experiences with the VNC mouse cursor. New install 4 times through this process. First attempt, cursor sync was fine. Next 3, it's all messed up. 1 time in between, when I had changed q35-2.9 to 2.10 in the XML file, the cursor fixed itself. No other changes on that boot, but the cursor was syncing fine. Right now, it's messed up, but if using NoMachine, Splashtop or Mac Screensharing from another Mac the cursor works fine. I'm only using the built in VNC to access the clover menu. After that I switch and normal boots, I don't need to select anything on the Clover menu, so it won't matter.
Happy to finally have it installed and fully updated! Everything appears to be working great!
Off the get my passthrough devices working so I can use this for my daily desktop machine instead of my older Macbook Pro.
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I would like to submit my findings on this topic as I came across this thread when I was research the same question.
I have a Mac Pro 4,1 (early 2009) that I have updated the EFI Firmware to be a 5,1. Both before and after the update, my Mac refused to boot from a MBR configured usb flash stick. I was able to take the Unraid flash device and boot my '14 Macbook Pro from it, but the old Mac EFI just won't do it.
I DID manage to boot the Unraid install from an SSD, connected to an internal SATA port, but..... Unraid doesn't support this option for use. You HAVE to have the USB flash device to save the configuration to as the system refuses to use the internal SSD after it's booted and the system is loaded into memory. I did read a post from Lime Tech saying that they do not support booting form an internal drive.
Being that I had it working, all but saving my configuration for the next reboot, I went on a mission to find a way to make it work. I found this link: http://www.ostricher.com/2012/09/setting-up-unraid-vm/
After reading through it, I tried that method too. I booted ESXi from a USB flash drive, used the empty space on the flash drive to create a datastore and then configured PCI Passthrough on the 6 port SATA controller AND my USB 3 PCI card. While I did get it to boot and it worked, it was definitely sluggish because of all the extra processing occurring with Unraid being in a VM. The setup process DID get me thinking of an option though.
In his guide, Itamar explained how he used Plop Bootloader to make VMware boot directly of a USB device, which was otherwise, unsupported and impossible. THIS got me thinking. I did a ton of reading about Plop Bootloader and the methods of installing it and using it. Ultimately, I needed a syslinux boot loader to load Plop Bootmanager, which I had already configured to stay hidden and load my USB flash drive directly. I HATE dealing with Grub and Grub2 and in general, boot loaders are not my thing. I found a thread talking about an app called YUMI to install a MULTIBOOT ISO boot manager with syslinux and you can boot any ISO or live ISO of linux and all kinds of operating system. The downside is that YUMI is a Windows app, but what the hell, right? I took my SSD that I had booting before, wrote the new MBR to the disk with syslinux and MULTIBOOT which then opens Plopbootloader as hidden and loads UNRAID. It sounds complicated, but the boot process literally takes about 40-50 seconds to get to the UNRAID boot. I modified MULTIBOOT's menu to skip everything, timeout after 3 seconds and load Plop by default with no keyboard interaction. I think the amount of time it takes for UNRAID to start loading is about 30 seconds now.
How often do you really reboot a NAS anyway? The bootloaders have nothing to do with the system once it's running.
There is 2 negatives to this and neither affect me at all.
1. I have to waste an internal SATA port JUST for the MBR and bootloader.
2. I'm using an SSD for nothing else, other than the bootloader.
I have 5 other internal SATA ports which are all being used for my disk Array and I have a 4 port, USB3 PCI card which I have a 4 drive external enclosure on and still have the ability to connect another enclosure, invidiual drives, etc.
Ultimately, UNRAID is running perfectly on my 2009 Mac Pro 4,1 with 32 gb of ram and 20 TB of storage space on the array with 2 TB of ssd cache space. I think that's a pretty damn good setup.
I'm also sure there is an easier method to get Plop Bootmanager loading on the internal disk, but every possibility I tried to load it from USB flash drive failed. This Mac Pro (and assuming others of this age and older) absolutely refuse to boot from an MBR partitioned USB flash device.
Here's a link with a tutuorial on using YUMI: http://smyl.es/tutorial-how-to-build-the-ultimate-custom-usb-drive-with-multiple-bootable-installs-for-windows-and-linux-and-portableapps-for-windows/
And the download link here: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/
Hopefully my info will help someone else make use their old Mac Pro or other old Mac. They are very solid machines!
NVidia Passthrough with Dual Monitors
in Prerelease Support [DEPRECATED]
Posted
So that's some info for me. OSX is on High Sierra. Are you running Sierra?
I have tried various version of Clover and have also left it sit after start up.
That still doesn't explain what happened with Windows 10. As I said, I was only trying the dual displays on Win10 for testing purposes to see whether my problem is OSX or something more general. Win10 was working and now doesn't. The only change was the update to the later 6.4 rc.
I had thought about creating an OSX Sierra installation to see whether that would work to determine if it's the NVidia Web drivers or something else.
I will also have to looks at the logs to see if I can find something in there too.
Unfortunately, no testing until this weekend and even then, time is a little short.