Unraid with 1920x1080 console - Finally

Yes. I'm oldskool, I like console, terminal, CLI, whatever you wanna call it. And for a long time Unraid gave me this 640x480 with 25 lines. Not happy. (LInux on various live-CD's did work)

No matter what I did, it just did not work, could not get any bigger resolution, not until today. I went all in, with a firm idea of "let's test enough variables, do "enough" reboots and see what a heck is going on. 

Since there is a possibility this might help others here's the setup:

• HP z820 (v2)
• 2 x 12-core Xeon E5-2695 v2 (2.4GHz, 3.2GHz turbo)
• 128Gb ECC 1866MHz (8 x 16Gb)
• Nvidia Quadro K4000
• z820 internal LSI SAS2308 Fusion-MPT SAS-2
• Additional LSI SAS2008 Fusion-MPT SAS-2 in PCIe x16 slot
• Asus 10Gb NIC, Motherboard NIC's disabled in BIOS
• Cache pool 4 x Samsung EVO870 in RAID10, 2Tb usable space
• Vault pool (backups) 2 x SSD 250Gb, 250Gb usable space
• Parity 1 x Seagate Ironwolf 8Tb
• Array disks 2 x Seagate Ironwolg 8Tb, 2 x Seagate Ironwolf 4Tb, 1 x WD Red 4Tb, 28Tb usable space
• At the moment 6 dockers, 9 VM's from Windows 11 to UNMS and HASSIO
• Unraid is at 6.10.0-RC1

I keep my server in the hall of my apartment, nicely quiet by itself but no sound at all coming from hall to living area. Since it's in the hall there's obviously no space for screens, keyboards etc, and here is where PiKVM comes in.  I can sit in my sofa with my notebook and have full, hardware-level control of the z820 from a browser, including controlling power-button and entering & adjusting bios. And since PiKVM is basically software-controlled display it gave a bit more tools for my quest of Full HD native console on Unraid. 

Background

No matter what I did with z820 bios or Unraid I just could not get more than a screen-resolution 1280x1024 with Unraid resolution of 1024x768. Most usually Unraid resolution was the horrible 640x480. I tried every trick I could find, from syslinux VGA=0 to efifb, nope, nothing.

BIOS in z820

I noticed one very interesting thing regarding BIOS settings. If you have selected POST-messages to be shown Unraid would use the low resolution of POST-messages ie. max 1280x1024. If you disabled POST-messages ie. in boot you would see the round HP-logo the server would initialize with one of resolutions the screen would allow, this means what PiKVM would allow. In my case with Quadro K4000 + PiKVM that would again be 1280x1024 and Unraid at 1024x768 or 640x480 depending on settings. So, there's a starting point, enable the HP logo, disable post-messages.

PiKVM

In practice PiKVM is the screen, it has a default EDID for the capture-card which means the EDID in PiKVM tells the graphics card "I support these resolutions". By stock it has to support wide variety of graphic cards and computers. Best I could make 1280x1024 with Unraid resolution of 1024x768. Most usually Unraid resolution was the horrible 640x480. 

But, we can change the EDID in PiKVM, and that is very easy. So I went with the Gigabyte & NUC option since it's 1920x1080 only. Enable the new EDID, reboot server for the hundred time, bite nails for a while. And see a bit squeezed HP-logo, test BIOS, yes, works. Reboot from BIOS to Unraid....

Result

The boot is finally as follows:

- z820 boots, it selects the screen resolution available from PiKVM EDID which is 1920x1080

- Unraid GRUB is quite funny, it's shown in quarter-size in upper left-corner. Could not care less, fully usable and readable

- The actual boot of Unraid is finally in 1920x1080

I can finally use the console how it's meant to be used!

Here's a screenshot from my laptop's browser-window, I usually use the Unraid console on my laptop in full-screen mode. Local hardware-level access from my sofa to a server in other end of the apartment. How nice is that

PS: English is not my native language, don't care about typo's

Edited October 8, 20223 yr by TeroS