metathias

Ahh. Hmm. I always turn off the power features of a VM. I just put it high performance mode. Seeing as how the VM has no real control over power functions anyway. And pulling a VM out of sleep can be a pain. If you want to play with power saving features. Your gonna need to do what you can on the unraid side. I would keep in mind. that unraid is after all a server and thus meant to run 24/7.

Perfectly normal for me. First core of my VM shows about the same with nothing running (15-20%). Again i would ignore this metric. Focus on real world benchmarks. And gameplay.

Honestly i have never thought to compare the two. Not sure what good it would do. Resource utilization meters. On both Unraid, And Task manager in the VM. Essentially just take a snapshot of the CPU current usage at the exact moment in time it was captured. It practically impossible to make sure they took a sample at the exact same moment in time. Therefore it highly unlikely their going to agree from one interval to the next about exactly how much that thread got utilized since the last interval.

My guess is that those dockers are probably eating into core 0 which should be isolated from the dockers, Core 0 and its hyperthread twin should be left exclusively to unraid. Try using CPU pinning on the dockers. But make sure NOT to use isolation on dockers. Leave isolation only to VMs and dont isolate core 0 or it hyperthread.. That will stop unraid from using it altogether. There might be a few cpu tweaks you can make to further improve performance. But if the unraid config is set up correctly. Even default settings for the VM should produce decent performance. If somewhat underwhelming. Also. Double check your memory resources. Try not to let it get down to those last few GB of ram. If so you could start getting huge I/O from the constant swapping any data unraid is trying to juggle. If that happens it can bring the whole system to a crawl. And should show in the CPU utilization graph on the dashboard of unraid.

USB controllers cant be passed through normally with the basic view VM editor. You have to manually add the XML yourself before it will show in the basic form view. However you can pass through any given USB device using the basic form view (The way i suggest NOT to use) @bastl I guess it really goes to show each persons needs to adjust their configuration to the hardware available to them. Personally i am on a 1950x with a Asus x399 Strix. I pass 2 of my built-in individual usb controllers to 2 different VMs. Where i have never had an issue with them in that config. Of course a add-in controller board is also an excellent way to go as well.

I would advise against using the web ui xml generator to pass through devices.. Not there is any wrong with the UIs method. devices themselves just pass through poorly to VMs. Passing controllers is the preferred method by a mile. I dont see anything wrong with your setup up. Even if it is a bit dense. Mine are as well. I would still however try to convince you to steer clear of the sound card.. No end in sight to the number of issues you will come up against. A sufficient USB audio board is 10 bucks.. Hell they come for free on the end of cheap headsets all the time. If your want digital audio for some reason.. Sort it out through the HDMI on your video board.. Thats where it will end up usually anyway.

Personally i dont try to passthrough audio to my VM. There are a host of issues that commonly crop up around doing that.. My solution was just to purchase USB sound cards. Their really pretty cheap. And are loads more stable in every way then the built-in passthrough solutions that exist out there. A slam dunk really. Seeing as how only 1 VM device could get that sound device anyway. The solution costs more...But not by much.

Interesting. The ACS override, and VFIO unsafe are known to both be very unstable and could be an issue. While in my limited attempts to use ACS override it did function to allow me to split off devices not normally allowed to do (more IOMMU groups) When attempting to separate those things into either separate VMs or just one VM (taking the bus away from just Unraid) would cause hanging, halting, And other ghostly phenomenon. As for your USB drive not showing up without UEFI enabled. Sounds like a bios settings might have something to do with that. Try to find a legacy/compatibility mode for your bios to turn off UEFI altogether on the BIOS side. Also clearing your boot keys might be necessary (Its seems like every generation they try to make it harder just to turn UEFI off) Then confirm the USB device is showing up in your bootable options in the BIOS. You might also through your bios carefully for IOMMU related options (there should be one somewhere) I looked through your MB manual for your motherboard (ROG Strix X570-E Gaming) and it was pretty useless for bios settings info. So you might have to hunt a bit to find the options your looking for.

Passing a USB device through to a VM using the Form view ticker method is pretty inconsistent. Something i try to do as little as possible. What i've done for a USB drive based VM is to use the manual Primary Vdisk Location method. And direct the path to the device-id of the drive. Like so. Supplementing your specific drive after the /dev/disk/by-id/ Using this method the VM will have total access to the drive as a SATA style device. Allowing you to format and partition it how you see fit. Also has the side benefit of storing the data as actual separate file data instead of a .vdisk img of the data. Edit - You can look up your exact device-id using the unraid terminal. Just execute "cd /dev/disk/by-id" command at root And then execute "dir" to get a listing of all the drives available to you. Make sure to use the first listing of your device. The one without the part whatever at the end.

Unraid not being bootable without UEFI sounds a bit odd to me. Its bootable either way for me. Having it on presented a host of issues for me in the past (Cant speak for recent versions of unraid). The most notable of which was the inability to actually grab the video card from unraid and give it back when the VM was strarting/ending. When i speak of a malformed XML i am speaking to a possible misconfiguration or incompatibility with a setting you have set in your VM. Perhaps you could post a copy of your VMs XML. And a copy of your IOMMU groups for further examination.

Sorry to hear that. Based on where your system seems to start showing issues AFTER the VM attempt to boot. The most likely culprit is a malformed VM config XML. Through this thread im seeing quite a few suggestions to use all manner of hacks. Which should not be necessary AFAIK at this point in time. Im pretty sure Unraid gladly gives up the primary GPU for instance so long as you dont use UEFI, And dont run the graphical version of unraid on boot. To enjoy VM rebootability though you have to deploy the VM with a link to its Vbios.

I dont think your gonna find anything hardware specific for your chipset in any of the current builds. So the previous build should be pretty much the same (compatibility wise). For how difficult it is to try the lower versions. 6.5 or 6.6 (Not very). Its worth a shot IMO.

Are you running 6.7? And the parity build/sync is going? If so I would be willing to bet it is the 6.7 File system performance bug many of us have been experiencing.

Supposedly its fixed in 6.8 but that has'nt been released yet. Soon they say. There have been significant changes to the underlying kernel in recent iterations. It is very difficult to keep up with the latest and greatest patchs, and feature improvements that go into it. And unfortunately some of those underlying systems have changed significantly just in the past few iterations. Which has a tendency to break things in unexpected ways. You have to keep in mind that the technologies being employed on Unraid. Such as the new KVM with passthrough support are bleeding edge new software. And have only been practical for a couple years now. But i can say from using it for the past 14 months of so. Its been as absolute god send of an OS. And has been really incredibly flexible environment for me to work, play, and experiment in. With next to no down sides. Other than my wife and childs VMs are taking up all my cores =P. And to be totally fair. A downgrade is like the easiest thing in the world. You throw all your current file from the USB drive into a backup folder on the drive (a 4GB thumb drive can store the entire OS like 4x with that) And then just unzip the downgraded zip files right in the root. Bam downgraded. Just dont forget to copy and paste in your license file.

I actually have one VM sitting directly on the cache drive as an image. Another gets passed through an NVMe drive. The last and latest one currently manul method described above. All of the above work great at the same time. So long as the resource distribution is not overly optimistic. I save about 80% 20% of my total ram (currently only 32GB) to unraid and for a few dockers.

Ahh ok. Yes that the way i pass through my SSDs as well. The hanging your experiencing in Unraid seems to me. Very likely a lack of resources on unraids part somewhere. Or the 6.7 bug that choking everyones bandwidth to death when it start doing multiple parallel file operations. To be honest im still running 6.5.x .

I do wonder exactly what you mean by Unraid crash's. Do you get a full system reset back to post? I've yet to have unraid actually crash on me. Its possible that by passing through a SATA controller the system might become destabilized. As far as my system goes (X399 Asus Prime board, With Threadripper 1950x) There are no SATA ports that get IOMMUs that dont also have several system critical parts attached to them. Thus disabling me from attempting to passthrough a SATA controller directly. Instead i use VMdisks Which have dedicated SSDs meant to host only those singular images (1 SSD per VM).

Sorry to hear that. Unraid is certainly not for the faint of heart. Particularly the KVM aspects. And to be honest that why the trial license is a reasonable way to allow people to attempt to make it work for them without being on the hook immediately for the cost of the OS/Hypervisor. On the subject of your issues. While i couldn't begin to solve your issues within a singular post here. Im fairly optimistic that it would be possible to make unraid work for you. Should you decide to give it another try. Lemme me know. Would be happy to attempt to help you remedy your issues.

Alot of people are chasing ghosts right now. Mostly due to some issues with the latest version of unraid. You might try going down to a 6.6.x or lower version of Unraid. And see if that improves your conditions any.

Are all you you guys with issues possibly trying to run this with a single video card installed IE Unraid in a Headless mode. Dedicating your one GPU to the SteamOS? If so. Are yall all remembering to use a known good Video bios? The issues many of you are describing sounds very similar to what happens when you attempt to do the same with a windows installation. Windows installs/loads fine without a good video bios, but goes to crap right after installation of video drivers. Which is what it sounds like SteamOS might be doing shortly after its install.

The problem your describing sounds verbatim like the issue i had when my vbios was no good. Windows would install, and boot up. But right when it would attempt to install the proper video drivers it would black out. Then restart and fail to boot again. So i have a strong feeling it your vbios. I've seen the space invader solution, But have never tried it myself. Having failed to backup and use my own bios file. I ended up using someone else that worked fine ever since. And really its only necessary for when your trying to grab your systems primary video card. Such as in a headless config. Like your trying to do. This is also my configuration.

You can add me to the list of people incapable of using the latest version of unraid. Due to extremely low simultaneous read bandwidth from the array. Multiple users trying to access data are get halting, And extremely low read and write rates (were talking low KB/s).

This is a good question. I did not discover the correct way to do it myself. Attempts to my use my own bios on an MSI 1080 TI Aero all failed. I ended up finding a 1080 ti bios somewhere someone else had posted and it worked. Been using it for over a year now. I'd love to know how to do this the correct way though.

Passthrough of USB works, But can be unstable. If you find it dropping the mic or any other USB devices consider a more stable method. Assigning the entire USB controller to the VM using IOMMU groups. If possible. Is suggested. If your limited on USB ports that way. Consider a USB hub. Their cheap. And you can use it to break your limited VM assigned USBs into a larger group of ports (This is what i do). If their USB 3.0+ there should be more then enough bandwidth for most use cases.

No storage AIBs at the moment. Just the built-in sata, And m.2. With one m.2 remaining. As for the expense. To be honest man you can get a whole bunch of good hardware on ebay right now if your willing to buy second hand. Im seeing 1950x go for half price on ebay. I think alot of people buy TR not knowing how to utilize it, and dump em preferring to go with higher clocked intel chips. Which is a waste of an amazing chip IMO. Once more developers begin to realize the value they have on their hands with these very high core count chips. They will start to get the respect they deserve. Being able to dedicate a portion of your chip to running a hackintosh VM, or linux environments for debugging, and testing is incredible. Talk about being able to play with things only the cloud providers have been able to toy with until now.